Re: [gentoo-dev] portage question

[Alexander Gretencord <arutha@gmx.de>]

On Wednesday 02 October 2002 09:39, Evan Read wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 02, 2002 at 09:22:06AM +0200, Henti Smith wrote: > On Tue, 01
> Oct 2002 23:09:14 +0000 > Leon Chiver <leon@level7.ro> wrote: > > > I've
> installed gentoo and I must say that I'm very pleased whith it.  > >
> Marvelous job. > > But there's still one feature I'm missing and which
> regards the update > > procedure: wouldn't it be nice if we could upgrade
> from one version of a > > package to another by only downloading the diff?
> A few days before I've > > installed mozilla-1.0, today I emerged 1.0.1.
> But I had to download the > > entire 1.0.1 archive, instead of only a diff
> file. For people with a > > limited internet access this would be a really
> great feature. > > Does anyone know, is such an improvement planned? > > I
> had a look on the bugzilla page and did a few searches .. didn't se
> anything that pertains to this, but I have to admit ..  > In the image of
> gentoo this should have been in portage already.  > > being able to update
> packages just with patches would be really nice for us low bandwidth users
> ..  >

Sorry for that but you _had_ to see that mess. Didn't think mutt would do such 
stuff or do you fake your User-Agent Header and are using Outlook? :)

> There was a thread about why the kernel stuff isn't done that way.  It was
> discussed that it is very hard to allow for people that sit at very
> different kernel versions to be able to upgrade with one ebuild.  Yes, one
> can do all the checks to see what is needed to go from 2.4.x to 2.4.19 (or
> even 2.2.x to 2.4.19) and just fetch the right diff, but that is much more
> difficult than "get latest source, unpack into /usr/src and patch".

Huh? What's so difficult about unpack source from version x, unpack from 
version y run a diff over the two directories and put that into 
patch-source-package z.

Now lets say we want to update our kernel from gentoo-sources-2.4.18 to 
gentoo-sources-2.4.19-r7. Portage sees there's already a linux-2.4.18.tar.bz2 
so we don't download the linux-2.4.19.tar.bz2 from kernel.org but instead 
download the patch from 2.4.18 to 2.4.19, unpack the 2.4.18 into our new 
directory, patch it to 2.4.19 and then patch in the stuff that makes a 
gentoo-sources-r7 out of it.

I don't see where this would be a problem either with the kernel or any other 
package. Of course you'd need quite some patches on the servers for that 
thats true :)

> There is nothing stopping anyone from creating thes ebuild themselves and
> posting them on the web say "diff2.4.16to2.4.19.ebuild" and giving people
> the ability to use them , even if they don't get commited.

No, don't build it into the ebuilds, let portage do it. The ebuild has nothing 
to do with it!


Alex
-- 
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety 
deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Benjamin Franklin