Arch Linux

derdilla

Member

Registered: Yesterday

Posts: 2

Thoughts on incremental package updates?

Got a silly idea while updating: Could the package manager only download the parts of the binary that changed? As far as I know google does this for android apps. Creating diffs is easy for configs or often uncompiled languages like python or qml, but also the binaries from C code usually leave unchanged functions unchanged (for similar compiler versions with a bit of luck).

I couldn't find any distro that does this, so I'm probably missing something here. Thoughts?

mithrial

Member

Registered: 2017-03-05

Posts: 130

Re: Thoughts on incremental package updates?

Didn't pacman support this a while ago?
The maintenance was too large. You would need to store a diff for each version to each newer version.
The binaries are not too big anyway, so the actual MBs saved in throughput should be too small to matter.

schard

Forum Moderator

From: Hannover

Registered: 2016-05-06

Posts: 2,549

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Re: Thoughts on incremental package updates?

RPM e.g. supports deltas [1].
I don't know whether Arch ever supported this, but it seems like a significant maintenance overhead.

[1] https://packages.fedoraproject.org/pkgs … /deltarpm/

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derdilla

Member

Registered: Yesterday

Posts: 2

Re: Thoughts on incremental package updates?

Interesting! I didn't think about the ongoing maintenance

I do somewhat disagree with "binaries are not too big anyway" notion, but I guess that's the price for a flexible distro at the cutting edge.

WorMzy

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From: Scotland

Registered: 2010-06-16

Posts: 13,331

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Re: Thoughts on incremental package updates?

Delta support was dropped back in 5.2.0. I don't think it was ever widely adopted in the first place. Maybe with all the build automation stuff going on in the background there may be renewed interest in this sort of thing on Arch, but for the time being there is no support for it.

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ploub

Member

Registered: 2007-05-16

Posts: 136

Re: Thoughts on incremental package updates?

I used deltas back in the day and I found them useful as I had a slow internet. IIRC they were dropped for security reasons