Bug 131768

Summary: RFE: implement delta/incremental/differential/etc. packages
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Nicholas Miell <nmiell>
Component: rpmAssignee: Paul Nasrat <nobody+pnasrat>
Status: CLOSED DUPLICATE QA Contact: Mike McLean <mikem>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: rawhideCC: nobody+pnasrat
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: FutureFeature
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Enhancement
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Last Closed: 2005-09-27 20:52:41 UTC Type: ---
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Nicholas Miell 2004-09-04 06:32:50 UTC 
Given two version of the same package, it should be possible to create
a delta package, which upgrades an installed instance of the older
package to the newer package.

The delta package would require the old version to be already
installed and contain xdeltas and full copies of files from the new
version.

i.e. when you install a delta package, it would check that the old
version of the package that it requires is installed, verify that all
of the files that must be unmodified in the old package actually are
unmodified, applies xdeltas to those files, creates new files, deletes
unneeded files, and replaces config files (standard rpmnew/rpmorig stuff).

The end result would be as if you downloaded the full version of the
new  package, and did rpm -U on that, except that the delta package
would be significantly smaller than a full sized RPM.

Creating a delta package would be a matter of "rpm-delta
blah-1.0-1.i386.rpm blah-2.0-1.i386.rpm", which would create
blah-1.0-1--2.0-1.i386.delta.rpm or something to that effect.
Comment 1 Jeff Johnson 2004-09-04 13:41:52 UTC 
The mechanics of applying a delta on the client are well known.

The harder, more complex, issue comes from managing all possible
deltas on a server. That cannot be easily solved, certainly
not by an rpm client.
Comment 2 Paul Nasrat 2005-09-27 20:52:41 UTC 

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 103205 ***