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Authors: Ben K. <benk@tilde.team>
Date: 2021-01-03
Since long ago one of the features I enjoyed a lot about Fedora was Yum/DNF and the eventual introduction of Delta RPMs. Some time ago on my podcast I mentioned that it seemed to me like the DRPMs were getting less effective from how I remembered them. I remember years ago getting huge savings like 90% reduction when downloading updates, and when I was living in Tajikistan with slow and unreliable mobile Internet it was practically essential.
However, nowadays I noticed that a lot of packages aren't provided as DRPMs anymore, and oftentimes the savings I saw were quite small, like 1-2%, which I hardly cared about. Also I don't know if this is a flaw in the design or whether my hard drive has issues, but a lot of DRPM builds fail now because of files on the disk having changed. If SMART is to be trusted, the hard drive is OK, but I guess for certain packages it's expected for some files to change on the disk.
Most recently, I started seeing stuff like this:
Failed Delta RPMs increased 5.9 MB of updates to 7.2 MB (-21.1% wasted)
Wow! Apparently now instead of saving a couple percent on the downloads it's now starting to waste data. In this case, ~20% sounds significant, but I can't say that I miss the two megs difference.
Anyway, kind of a shame to see the way this has gone for me. Maybe I should just switch to Debian. ;p