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posted by martyb on Thursday November 10 2016, @02:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the differences-are-good dept.

I find the Libre Office Update tool for the Windows version of the Suite is not really worth having at all. A notice will pop up indicating that an update is available, but the tool just goes to the Libre Office web site for you to download the full package manually. Compare that to the Pale Moon web browser, which will download small update packages when a new version becomes available. You do not need to remove the old version of Pale Moon to install the update, because its update tool takes care of it automatically.

Libre Office is a high profile Open Source application, I am surprised that their version for the Windows operating system does not have an easy upgrade path. I think that working on the Upgrade tool would be a worthy upgrade to the Suite, and the current version is holding back adoption of it.

Disclaimer: I am not a programmer, so I can't write an upgrade tool on my own. Also my employers owns any software I create (employment agreement).

[Ed note: I was debating whether or not to run this story. Sounds like it could lead to a good discussion. If LibreOffice can download deltas on other platforms, why not on Windows? What practical reason could there be?]


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  • (Score: 2) by r1348 on Thursday November 10 2016, @10:30AM

    by r1348 (5988) on Thursday November 10 2016, @10:30AM (#425075)

    Well that's ArchLinux's problem, deltarpms are a reality since many years, Fedora implemented it in 2009: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Presto [fedoraproject.org]

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 10 2016, @06:10PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 10 2016, @06:10PM (#425217)

    Yes, I remembered that from the early times.
    Back then, with a modem, you saved 1 minute in download time, but it took 10 extra minutes for it to apply the delta.
    Typical example of a technology that sounds good, but in practice, at least in the way it is implemented, it is utter crap and a waste of time.
    Considering that for most people network speeds have increased far, far more than CPU or disk speeds, I expect things to be even worse nowadays.
    (I see that such a thing is nice to have, when you only have metered connections for example, but unless they managed to speed up and reduce disk IO of that method by more than 10x, it is a broken concept)

    • (Score: 2) by r1348 on Friday November 11 2016, @10:13AM

      by r1348 (5988) on Friday November 11 2016, @10:13AM (#425618)

      Well, distros cannot predict your network speed, but since they all aim to reach the widest possible markets, delta updates are a good choice. It also saved them bandwidth, which helps.
      The process was sped up and optimized a lot, now for example you don't have to download extra metadata, which in itself was often bigger than the delta difference. Disk I/O is not such a problem with SSDs, even on HDDs now it's much quicker, I just applied a LibreOffice update to one of my Fedora boxes, it downloaded 9MB and took 1:30 to install.