Hi, I live in a very poor country where bandwidth is not cheap. Recently I saw a proposal to remove delta RPMs in Fedora 39 because they “take too much space in mirrors”, “use too much CPU”, “never work”, “always fail”, “always give MD5 mismatches”, “are broken by design”, “Fedora doesn’t do delta R…

I often see similar results with the delta rpms. Can you point to the proposal to do away with the deltas? I have not seen any official notification about that. A proposal is a suggestion that may or may not be followed.

[image] Hazel Bunny: Now, why are delta RPMs being phased out? Because moat people see either no size saving or less then a couple of percent saving. My experience is the same and I update once a week as well. Given that the discussion on fedora dev mailing list was favouring dropping delta …

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/thread/NLH6LCDDLEPOP74UOLNQG4NIIVBM7CTU/

Additional information : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOhS6_28Gok Fedora Linux Finally Kills Off Delta RPM Removing support for DeltaRPMs in Fedora [LWN.net] Removing support for DeltaRPMs in Fedora

Also, if most of your downloads takes less than a second for 10 or so rpms, you don’t really have a benefit for delta rpms. It is important to realize that not all people have internet connects that are that fast, and for whom it is important to have delta rpms reducing the download size. Also som…

Here is some data about delta RPMs from my systems. I have records of most of the updates I have done on 6 Fedora hosts since the start of the year. Some are KDE deveopment systems one fileserver/imap-server, one web server. The updates are run approx 1 week apart. The number of updates I have r…

[image] Villy Kruse: It is important to realize that not all people have internet connects that are that fast, and for whom it is important to have delta rpms reducing the download size. Also some people need to pay real money for every byte they download or for every minute they are connected. …

I agree that delta RPMs can be useful for slow or metered connections, but I’m not so sure it is worth to keep enabled by default, as disabling it often makes upgrades faster.

[image] F40 Change Proposal: Drop Delta RPMs (System Wide) Change Proposals Wiki Link https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Drop_Delta_RPMs Announce Link https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel-announce@lists.fedoraproject.org/thread/CE4I6P6WWQIJT…

As I mentioned in discussion thread for the Change proposal (I am the author of the proposal), I doubt that Delta RPMs actually provide you any benefits on metered connections. Assuming you do not upgrade daily, you’re getting the worst of both worlds (constant cost of Delta RPMs in the repository m…

Are delta RPMs dead?

Ask Fedora

decathorpe (Fabio Valentini) June 21, 2025, 8:29pm 17

They’re really gone.

Also see F40 Change Proposal: Drop Delta RPMs (System Wide) - #7 by decathorpe for an explanation why they probably wouldn’t save you any bandwidth anyway (at least not in the way they were implemented).

Topic		Replies	Views
Rethinking deltarpms Ask Fedora dnf	8	3190	March 23, 2022
Why are Delta RPMs still a thing? Ask Fedora rpm , dnf	9	3362	September 14, 2023
Dnf DRPM not needed Ask Fedora	13	685	November 23, 2023
Delta rpms: wasted? Ask Fedora dnf	2	1542	May 31, 2022
Why firefox does not have deltarpm updates Ask Fedora f35 , rpm , firefox	2	526	March 27, 2022

Are delta RPMs dead?

Related topics