> My home internet connection, for various reasons, tends to alternate
> between the two quality levels of "blows balls" and "blows giant
> balls". This makes downloading and installing new snapshots an
> exercise in frustration. I noticed that binary patches, as made by
> bsdiff (thank you Colin Percival), could reduce the download time
> significantly, if only there was patch generating machine in the sky
> (sorry, cloud). So I made one. Link below.
>
> I've been using this with i386 for a while now. At first I more or
> less hand generated the updates, but now it's all automatic. Even
> including amd64.
>
> Basically, it's a perl script that downloads a database of patches and
> applies them. There's a little bit of labor involved in setting it
> up, but after that, you can run the script whenever you like and it
> will take care of business. I generate snap diffs up to every day,
> but the script will download batches if you care to only update on
> weekends or something.
>
> The only real requirement (besides a few packages) is that you start
> off running a snapshot I have diffs for. This goes back about a week
> for i386, and about 2 days for amd64. And you need to have all the
> sets installed (including X), or there will be bitching and whining.
> Please pay attention to the part about creating
> /var/db/bluesnapper/etc and xetc directories.
>
> Note that these are not official, and about the only promise you'll
> get that I'm not secretly inserting trojans into everything is that
> it's not worth my time to do so.
>
> Anyway, more detailed instructions and a link to the actual script are
> below. I think it works.
>
>
http://www.tedunangst.com/snapper.html
