[CentOS-devel] Delta RPMs (drpms) for CentOS-6 and CentOS-7

Tue Jun 4 20:42:18 UTC 2019
Jonathan Dieter <jdieter at gmail.com>

On Tue, 2019-06-04 at 09:55 -0500, Johnny Hughes wrote:
> We are having issues with drpms on CentOS-6 i386 and x86_64 and on
> CentOS-7 x86_64.
> 
> The technical issues sometimes cause us to have to rebuild all drpms
> over again .. and the time involved is very large.  Also storing the
> drpms and moving them around takes up a lot of space and bandwidth.

So, for whatever it's worth, when we first introduced drpms into
Fedora, the idea was to only keep them for GA -> n and n-1 -> n.  This
limited drpms to a maximum of two per package and made them far easier
to manage, while still providing drpms for the common cases (updating a
brand new install and doing regular updates).

I don't know how much use it would be, but I did write a tool a decade
ago, I think called prunedrpms in the presto-utils package, that would
remove old drpms.  It's unmaintained and was retired retired years ago,
but it might help with this use-case.

On the other hand, drpms have been pretty useless in Fedora for well
over a year now[1] (old drpms get removed every compose, which means
they're only available if you update every single day), and there are
questions over there about whether or not it's worth it to keep
building them.  That's an indicator that it may be time to retire them.

Jonathan

 1: https://pagure.io/releng/issue/7215
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