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

[Bernie Innocenti]

On Mon, 2009-06-15 at 22:15 +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:

> What about something similar to the deltarpm feature in F11 where
> there's a delta created between the previous release and it is served
> over standard http/ftp/whatever like the full package. In the initial
> set of updates released for F11 this reduced the update from something
> like 120 meg to around 18. I'm not sure what format the .xo packages
> take so I'm not sure what the differences/similarities are.

xo bundles are just zip files.  One could create file-wise deltas or
even a collection of per-file xdeltas, but getting all corner cases
right would start to get to tricky.

The XO bundle format was invented because existing package formats with
dependencies and all that were considered too hard to use for the
majority of developers.

If we are going to re-implement all these advanced features of real
package managers, then why don't we just pick a popular one (rpm, dpkg,
I don't care) along with its updaters (yum, aptitude... along with
PackageKit)?

The strongest objection I heard for this proposal is that we need to
support local, unprivileged installation.  Well, this can certainly be
added to a package manager faster than than we can add deltas to our XO
bundle format.  Or, we could reconsider our requirements and perform
system-wide instalations perhaps with --noscripts (which the xo bundles
don't support anyway).


-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/