When doing an upgrade from one version of a package to another, emerge currently downloads a full source package. This is fine for small packages, but when the source package is >5Mb or so this can get annoying. What'd be good is if the Gentoo system automatically kept patches on the server side. So that instead of a ~10Mb source download you could download a ~1Mb patch. Like so: - you already have foo-1.2.3 installed, WITH its source archive still existing - 'emerge --update foo'; finds version 1.4.5 available - downloads the patch from 1.2.3 to 1.4.5 (or alternatively multiple patch files for the incremental steps, whichever is easier -- though a single-step patch would be smaller and hence better) - unzips the 1.2.3 sources and applies the patch(es) - rezips the new source tree, ready for the next update - starts building, as normal For user-friendliness, you should keep patches around until either (a) the upgrade has been existing (and in the stable branch) for more than six months -- people should be updating at least that often anyway), or (b) the size of the patch exceeds the size of the source archive (if you're doing sequential mini-patches, then drop off the oldest ones as the cumulative size starts to exceed the size of the source archive). Whenever a patch is not available, emerge just downloads the full archive as normal. This way small archives will never get a patch, and major upgrades would probably still require downloading the full archive (since too many files would have changed, or large binary files changed), but the common case (large archives changing only a few files) the total download size would be significantly reduced. That should both help users and reduce the load on your servers. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce:
This bug is completely a duplicate of countless other bugs. Please search bugzilla before filing :)
I did search. Nothing similar comes up with "ALL emerge patch" -- what else would you suggest trying?
You probably want to check app-portage/deltup or app-portage/getdelta - both are in portage (still masked).
Thanks -- that sounds exactly like what I was looking for. I'll check it out :) There's all sorts of random goodies hidden away in the portage tree, which none of the FAQs or guides tell you about.......
I can't find a duplicate either although I am sure there is one still open. Either way, GLEP 25 definitely covers it and is being actively worked on.
Reopening for duping
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 24433 ***
