Julian Andres Klode

Delta upgrades revisited

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-

News from the APT team

This talk will look at the developments since last DebConf and what our plans are for the future. Highlights:

• zstd support for APT, dpkg; and what it means for us
• the dpkg frontend lock
• evaluation of seccomp sandboxing; problems with it
• happy eyeballs and what it means for apt on mixed ipv6/ipv4 networks
• new JSON-RPC-based hooks for apt; and an outlook on future possibilities for more complete RPC
• $random other bits