Newsgroups:  gmane.linux.debian.user
Date:        Tue, 12 Sep 2006 21:13:30 +0200

> For a couple of month I have seen an annoying change in behavior of
> aptitude update and apt-get update.  Formerly, a couple of package
> files where downloaded which took a few seconds.  Now I normally see
> that aptitude update downloads hundreds of files named like
>
>    Get:282 2006-09-11-1318.15.pdiff [13.3kB] Get:283
>    2006-09-11-1318.15.pdiff [13.3kB] Get:284
>    2006-09-11-1318.15.pdiff [34.3kB] Get:285
>    2006-09-11-1318.15.pdiff [34.3kB] Get:286
>    2006-09-11-1318.15.pdiff [34.3kB]
>
> and this takes quite long.  From the name I guess these are only
> differences two package files so that less data have to be
> transferred.  However, the overhead of nearly 300 TCP connections
> causes this to take *much* longer on some systems than simply
> downloading the whole package file.

Apt is configurable in this respect, it just isn't documented yet (see Bug #376158):

apt-get update -o Acquire::Pdiffs=false

or, to make this setting permanent, put the following in /etc/apt/apt.conf:

Acquire::PDiffs "false";

All package management tools using apt should honour this.

Jochen Schulz

Acquire::PDiffs "false";