[Sugar-devel] Problem using sugar-update-control to update large (100+ MB) activity bundles

[Bryan Berry]

We soon need to roll out updated version of Nepal's custom suite of
activities, E-Paath. The updated bundle weighs in at a whopping 180 MB
zipped and 300 MB unzipped. We have found it impractical to use the
sugar-update-control mechanism to update the bundle. While E-Paath is
large, the updated bundle is only 30% different than the currently
deployed bundle. 

Updating E-Paath with sugar-control-update from Sugar 0.82 currently
takes 17 minutes. And that is w/ XO updating against the XS. I figure it
would be at least 3x longer w/ 30 XO's updating at once, if many of the
updates don't completely stall out. 40 minutes is simply too long in a
chaotic classroom environment.

I would like to know if the newer version of sugar-control-update 
http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/sugar-update-control/repos/mainline/blobs/master/src/model.py only transfers the differences between the new and old bundles, thus making the update process much faster. I have stared at the code myself for about 30 minutes and I can't tell. If the newer version of the sugar-update-control is much faster, how much trouble would it be to backport it to 0.82, if even possible?

While E-Paath is a particularly large activity there are other
activities that are of significant size such as the big GCompris bundle.
wikipedia.xo, and hopefully more in the future.

Regards,

-- 
Bryan W. Berry
Technology Director
OLE Nepal, http://www.olenepal.org