Patch updates for text-heavy packages in pacman

Question

I just updated qt-doc from 4.5.2 to 4.5.3, a download of 90.3MiB. The package for 4.5.2 (which I downloaded just a month earlier) was 90.1MiB. This is about the biggest package I get with any regularity, but I've been telling pacman to
--ignore qt-doc
because the download is a pain when I'm busy doing other things.
Out of curiosity, I extracted and diffed the two packages:
$ mkdir 4.5.2; tar -xzf qt-doc-4.5.2-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.gz -C4.5.2
$ mkdir 4.5.3; tar -xzf qt-doc-4.5.3-1-any.pkg.tar.gz -C4.5.3
$ diff -rN 4.5.2 4.5.3 | gzip > outfile.gz
The size of the resulting file was 1.3MiB. That is, pacman has me downloading almost 70 times as much data as I would be with the simplest of improvements.
User-modified files might pose a small problem, and you'd need a policy for which from/to diffs to provide, but this would be a big win for a small price even if only the [curr-1:curr] patch was available.
Obviously not a good idea for most things, but for source and documentation packages it's almost silly not to do it.

Answer 1

Terribly sorry if I caused offense  (or sounded "pissed"). Perhaps I should be more explicit:
I'm a bored programmer. If some extra manpower will help things along (that is, if this is sitting on the back-burner because it's not interesting or important) I'm willing to spend some time in the trenches.
Edit: Looking around it seems folk are more stuck on how to best implement this, rather than on the implementation itself. Ho hum, hope it turns out well, but it doesn't really look like I can do much to help.
Last edited by repsilat (2009-12-01 11:14:40)