Re: Binary Updates for DragonFly

[Erik Wikström <Erik-wikstrom@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 2007-12-16 14:58, Matthias Schmidt wrote:
> He,
> 
> * Simon 'corecode' Schubert wrote:
>> Matthias Schmidt wrote:
>> > Thats right, but I'm a fan of saving disk space and bandwith.  Distributing
>> > complete binaries has one big advantage.  We could update user-modified
>> > binary files which is not easily possible with diff/pach.
>> 
>> Yes.  Both ways don't necessarily exclude each other, assuming that
>> mirrors have enough space (they do, usually).
> 
> One could think about an approach which patches the file is its an
> "unmodified" one or copy the whole file over if its a modified one.
> This would keep RELEASE as well as "self-compiled" users happy.

I would expect that if a user have some kind of "modified" binaries that
is because they like it that way. To have an update-program replace
those binaries with "standard" binaries might not be desirable at all.

On the other hand, I would suspect that those user are not the primary
target for such an update mechanism but rather for the more "casual"
users who are running the "stock" installation.

Of course more advanced user can use it but instead of downloading diffs
from some server they update their source and compile on a master server
 and the diffs are then fetched from there to the other installations.

-- 
Erik Wikström