Someone just needs to talk to the Debian people about fixing this. Honestly, I thought this was fixed two years ago, but a friend of mine (one who works in the Cydia ecosystem, ironically), was complaining about diff updates a couple weeks ago, and it turns out it was not. I mostly outsourced "upstreaming to distributions" (as opposed to to projects) to a friend of mine who now works for RightScale, and so I never really gained for myself the right contacts in that beurocracy, but if no one else does I should probably get around to sending this suggestion to them...

Just asking, have you gotten one of the Debian CTTE guys to file a top level proposal (just like the systemd proposal https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=727708).

I think you are one of the few people that truly understand the ecosystem and probably are the right person to influence this.

Incidentally, I had a pretty interesting bthread today on the question bwhether we will see a single package manager format on Linux. Wonder what your thoughts are...and in general the state of package management on Linux. Would you build Cydia on something else today?

The technical committee isn't necessary unless you've already asked and been told "no".

The ftpmasters and the apt maintainers would be the appropriate pair of contacts.

CTTE is when you have a dispute over a technical decision. From my reading above comments, there is no conflict but just lack of interest.

You don't really need cumulative diffs anymore. Sure, they would be nice to have, but with pipelining and client-side merging of the patches before applying, things are not that much slower.

I have to take that back. For Contents-Source, it's ugly. The rest is fine though.