Re: New Beta - with Delta RPM support!

On Feb 15, Kai Schaetzl <[email protected]> wrote:

> Markus Gaugusch wrote on Sat, 12 Feb 2005 00:14:38 +0100 (CET):
>
>> delta rpm support
>>
>
> what exactly is this? I know what delta means in general but in this 
> context? Is this a better, standard way of checking differences between 
> packages apart from versioning?
In older SuSE versions, an update was provided by offering a completely 
new rpm with the full new version.
This was improved by suse using so-called "patch" rpms which only contain 
the changed files (of course you need to have an older version to use that 
one).
SuSE 9.2 offers another improvement: delta rpms
A delta rpm contains only the changes of the changed files. E.g. if a 20mb 
file changes only in 5 bytes, the patch rpm will have at least 20mb, but 
the delta rpm only a few bytes (+ little overhead).

Practical value: ~26MB of download on a fresh (in my case: upgraded) suse 
9.2 system in comparison to nearly 100MB of download using patch rpms 
(default).

Markus

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