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Asked: 2025-03-21 16:25:58 +0800 CST

What is PDiff in Ubuntu update?

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What are PDiff files and what can they do?

They are important or can I do something that do not downloaded them?

apt

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    PDiff files are "delta" files that allow you to only download changes since the last update, and not the entire package indexes each time.

    PDiffs exist only for packages indexes. To cite from the "Debian Administrator's Handbook":

    To speed up the process, APT can download “diff” files containing the changes since the previous update, as opposed to the entire file. To achieve this, official Debian mirrors distribute different files which list the differences between one version of the Packages file and the following version. They are generated at each update of the archives and a history of one week is kept. Each of these “diff” files only takes a few dozen kilobytes ...

    The same is true for Ubuntu, since it uses Debian's packaging system.

    To sum up, PDiffs let you download changes to package indexes faster than you would otherwise do. However for the actual packages, you still download packages in their entirety.

    More information here and here (if anyone can provide a better source of information, please let me know).

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