On Tue, 2005-11-29 at 16:01 +0000, Nigel Metheringham wrote:
How well does it work if you pull the rpm header (presumably thats
always needed for an update), build the payload using existing files on
the system (ie from the previous install) via cpio/minigzip, glue the 2
together and rsync that?
Badly. The compressed payload doesn't rsync well -- you have to
decompress it if you want rsync to do anything other than just download
it all again.
There were once some zlib patches which made zlib-compressed stuff
slightly more rsync-friendly by deliberately discarding history and
inserting sync points in the data stream, but they're not a patch on
just rsyncing the _uncompressed_ version.
It does require mirrors to give rsync access - which is probably
pretty wide spread *but* would need the rsync URLs for mirrors to be
made available - you can't just assume that you can do
s/^(f|ht)tp:/rsync:/
Yeah. Even rsync access to the extracted cpio payload shouldn't be
entirely impossible.
--
dwmw2