On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 1:19 AM, Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff@gmail.com> wrote:
What happens to a client that is more than 100 snapshots behind?

Remember OSTree is a content-addressed object store (like git), not a chain of deltas (like Subversion, and other systems out there such as Chromium Autoupdate, and Docker).  

So upgrades will still work via the current "one HTTP request per file" model, regardless of what revision the client and server are on.

Potentially they wouldn't get access to a delta.  Now it would be possible to keep around deltas for older revisions even after pruning the "loose" objects.

Ultimately while the "loose" design may seem naïve, it's not hard to scale static webservers to many clients - and much more so when HTTP2.0/SPDY is more widely deployed.