Portage could have an update feature for binary packages ($PN-bin-$PV), which perhaps could work like this: - The new-version/update packagefile(e.g. .tar.bz2) is downloaded, it is unzipped and for each file it contains the md5sum is compared to the md5sum of currently installed file. - If the md5sums are different, the new file is copied to $D. - Then the modified files are merged into the system. This way the complete reinstallation of big packages (e.g. ut200X) is skipped if I only want to update to a new pach. It want affect the downloadsize, but the installation-time. The problem that e.g. the ut200X files are stored on DVDs/CDs and this way are not accessible at the time of the update could be worked around by making portage, when the update-only-the-new-files-and-dont-reinstall flag is set, only consider source-files (SRC_URI) which are marked as a patch (e.g. "I-am-a-patch: patch.tar.gz"). Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce:
Too much overhead for too little benefit: You still had to unpack the whole thing, you additionally had to check the md5s of the installed files, not even mentioning all the problems with creating the correct CONTENTS file.
