A meme styled like the “I receive / you receive” Meme format. At the top, it says “Starting full system upgrade…”. On the left, under “I receive,” it says “Total Download Size: 5982.67 MiB” and “Total Installed Size: 22816.87 MiB.” On the right, under “You receive,” it says “Net Upgrade Size: –699.29 MiB,” making fun of the fact that Arch updates often reduce used space even though multiple gigabytes may be downloaded
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[–] 28 points 11 months ago (8 children)

Which is WAY more economical.

Rebuilding packages takes a lot of compute. Downloading mostly requires just flashing some very small lights very quickly.

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    If you have multiple computers, you can always set up a caching proxy so you only have to download the packages once.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    That reminds me of Chaotic AUR, though it’s an online public repo. It automatically builds popular AUR packages and lets you download the binaries.

    It sometimes builds against outdated libraries/dependencies though, so for pre-release software I’ve sometimes had to download and compile it locally still. Also you can’t make any patches or move to an old commit, like you can with normal AUR packages.

    I’ve found it’s better to use Arch Linux’s official packages when I can, though, since they always publish binaries built with the same latest-release dependencies. I haven’t had dependency version issues with that, as long as I’ve avoided partial upgrades.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    Yeah, totally is. There's a reason nobody publishes diffs

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    openSUSE Leap does have differential package updates. Pretty sure, I once saw it on one of the Red-Hat-likes, too.

    But yeah, it makes most sense on slow-moving, versioned releases with corporate backing.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    Ooh, got any links on how Leap does this? My searching isn't yielding much

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Had to search for a bit, too, but finally found the relevant keyword: Delta RPMs
    (Which also explains why it's a Red Hat / SUSE thing. 😅)

    Here's a decent article, which links to some more in-depth explanations: https://www.certdepot.net/rhel7-get-started-delta-rpms/

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