[Aptitude-devel] Bug#791662: aptitude: debdelta integration

[Julian Andres Klode]

On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 01:59:22PM +0200, A Mennucc1 wrote:
> dear all,
> 
> first of all, I am happy to see that debdelta is useful.
> 
> There was an attempt to integrate in aptitude in the past, as a
> apt-method (there are some traces in the code since).
> 
> But keep in mind that debdelta is integrated in 'cupt' that is another
> package manager, similar to 'aptitude'.

If we want to integrate debdelta (or a replacement) into APT (aptitude
does not make a lot of sense, it's a fancy APT frontend - we should
reassign that to apt I think), we need the following properties:

1. An index of all deltas (probably per-arch) with checksums for them
   (basically that's old hash, new hash, delta hash, and size. hashes
    should be SHA256 or SHA512). Preferably also Package, Version,
   Old-Version, Architecture fields.
2. A release file signing the index

That is, something like dist/unstable/InRelease and a
dist/unstable/main/binary-amd64/Deltas.xz.

We want to have that for security reasons (we do not
want to trust unsigned data), and of course for progress display
(we need to know how many files to fetch and how large they are).

I'm still not sure if debdelta is the right approach, or if we can
come up with something faster.

-- 
Debian Developer - deb.li/jak | jak-linux.org - free software dev

When replying, only quote what is necessary, and write each reply
directly below the part(s) it pertains to (`inline'). Thank you.