Re: [Flightgear-devel] Aircraft update in launcher

[Edward d'A. <tru...@gm...>]

On Fri, 15 Nov 2019 at 09:18, Erik Hofman <er...@eh...> wrote:
>
> On 11/14/19 11:44 PM, Michael Danilov wrote:
> > On Thu, Nov 14, 2019 at 10:04:56PM +0000, merspieler wrote:
> >> Is there a reason for downloading the entire aircraft every time it
> >> gets updated instead of just pulling a diff (eg. git pull or the svn
> >> equivalent)?
> >
> > I was about to ask the same question! Personally, this is one of the
> > reasons I keep installing aircraft from git or svn instead of
> > launcher.
>
> I think the launcher downloads a complete zip archive of the aircraft
> created from the latest FlightGear release so the aircraft and software
> are guaranteed to match.
>
> Which makes sense for the average user, but maybe less for developers.

Apart from the complications of handling zip file diffs, I would also
assume that there is a server storage issue, as you would need:

    - The collection of full zip files.
    - Multiple collections of diffs between each release revision
versions (2019.1.1 -> 2019.1.2 -> 2019.1.3)
    - Multiple collections of diffs between each long-term stable
release revision versions (2018.3.1 -> 2018.3.2 -> 2018.3.3 ->
2018.3.4 -> 2018.3.5)
    - Possibly collections of diffs between all combinations of the above.

On top of this zip file diff and storage issue, you would also need a
clever algorithm that can handle any erratic version jumping by the
user.  Anyway, the storage issue is the reason we don't have multiple
5 Gb collections for different FlightGear versions.

So the first issue to solve would probably be for someone to donate to
the FlightGear project a server with a huge HD capacity, a permanent
IP address, and monstrous bandwidth capabilities for large downloads
from potentially hundreds of thousands of FlightGear users ;)

Regards,

Edward