Sounds like a good idea. Just one point though: In article <[🔎] 19990707114952.A24104@bluegreen.dhis.org> you write: > I still cannot find a clean way to actually apply the patches. Ideally, it >would be quite simple: you would execute dpkg --install on the new file. In >the 'unpack' phase of dpkg, dpkg would unpack data.tar.gz as usual, but then do >an 'xdelta patch' for all contents of delta.tar.gz, creating backups of >originals as with data.tar.gz [I don't actually know what mechanism is used >normally for this; are the old files renamed or do the new ones get .dpkg-new >appended, or is something else done?]. This way, if something goes horribly >wrong in the patching you can complain about an error and restore things to the >way they were. There would have to be a way to indicate patching information >elsewhere, of course. Perhaps a Patches: control item could be added; I don't >know what would be done about Packages.gz and apt, or whether distributing >patches on the FTP mirrors is a good use of space. I would seriously consider adding some sort of check (eg encode the MD5SUM of the orginal file somewhere) so that an error can be produced if the system operator altered the original file (something I have done from time to time). In this case, the system operator knows to download the full version, and not just the patched version. -- Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>
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