Re: [gentoo-dev] Portage 1.8.1 released

[Dan Armak <danarmak@gentoo.org>]

On Sunday 30 December 2001 09:52, you wrote:
> This depends on how the person that upgraded the package did it.
>
> With this functionality all developers should try to use patches rather
> than the full file (if they are available). I come to think of the
> kernel-sources which always provides patches for updating.
Yes, but on the other hand, after a couple of months like this, the patches 
will become too large. That is, all kernel patches from 2.4.0 to 2.4.17 are 
probably a lot bigger than 2.4.17 on its own.
The problem is, someone who updates his kernel (in this example) every two 
weeks will always want to download patches, and will gain by them. But 
someone who installs gentoo for the first time, or hasn't kept his distfiles 
dir, will have to download an old package and lots of diffs and will lose by 
it.
So we need portage support smart enough to choose between downloading 
patches/diffs (if you already have an old version) or the latest version (if 
you don't).

> For really large packages it might be nice if we did diff's and uploaded
> to ibiblio.
I'm probably dreaming here, but maybe we coud have some diff auto-generating 
system, which could provide a diff between any two versions, like cvs does. 
But that's far in the future, if it happens at all.

-- 

Dan Armak
Gentoo Linux Developer, Desktop Team
Matan, Israel