Fwd: XO in-field upgrades

[Christopher Blizzard]

On Mon, 2007-06-25 at 15:38 -0400, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
> 
> 
> To my mind, this makes it clear that the on-wire format should be a
> binary diff.  We could uncompress these diffs on receipt and maintain
> a blob store as in the current proposal, but it seems much more
> reasonable to sign, authenticate, and store the *diffs* rather than
> the *blobs*, so that we don't need to recompute diffs when we want to
> pass on our upgrade to a neighboring XO. 

It's not clear what that data means, exactly.  Do those files like this:

  158 usr-bin-clamconf
  158 usr-bin-clamdscan
  161 usr-bin-clamscan
  159 usr-bin-freshclam
  162 usr-bin-sigtool

Actually include binary files changes or are they just permissions
changes?  If so you're >75x larger charge seems a little over the top
since they wouldn't be transferred at all in Alex's case outside of the
manifest. :)

That being said, this is pretty compelling stuff.  I would love to see
this done against various versions of libgklayout.so, which will
probably be our largest offender.

It also might be interesting to layer a diff system on top of what Alex
has proposed so you could do it either way - diffs if ya got 'em, raw if
ya don't.

--Chris