Delta upgrades revisited

Speaker: Julian Andres Klode

Track: Packaging, policy, and Debian infrastructure

Type: Short talk (20 minutes)

Video:

Room: Xueshan (雪山) Live Stream

Time: Aug 03 (Fri), 11:00

Duration: 0:20

Upgrades often involve redownloading package content that is already on your system, wasting bandwidth, and thus potentially time. debdelta has been around for quite some time solving the bandwidth problem, but it’s approach to deltas is slow - it reconstructs .deb files, including compression; hence with a DSL connection, it’s going to be slower than no deltas.

This talk introduces a new approach to delta upgrades that is substantially faster than debdelta; and, with tiny patches to dpkg, these deltas can be installed just like a .deb - without needing to reconstruct anything-