Hi, data dumps people.
I've been working on a tool to generate smaller update files from XML dumps
by just saving the diff between the previous dump and the latest revision.
It doesn't aim to do everything the new dump format does, and indeed it
looks like the dumps project will make it obsolete at some point, but I'm
putting this out there to see if it's useful in the interim.
You can get it at
https://github.com/twotwotwo/dltp
After downloading one of the binaries, you can put it in a directory
with enwiki-20130805-pages-articles.xml.bz2 and run:
./dltp
http://www.rfarmer.net/dltp/en/enwiki-20130805-20130812-cut-merged.xml.dltp…
That download is ~50 MB, but it expands to about 4GB of XML, consisting of
the latest revision's text for every page that was updated 8/5-8/12. (A
diff for 7/9-8/5 was 440MB.) You can pipe the XML output to something,
rather than saving it to a file, using the -c flag.
This all sounds great, and maybe it is if bandwidth is your bottleneck.
There are lots of important caveats, though:
- *It looks likely to be obsoleted by official WMF diff dumps. *I started
on this a while back, and at the time, from what I'd read, I thought diff
dumps weren't a high priority for the official project so might be worth
implementing unofficially. More recently it sounds more like official diff
dumps actually might not be all that far off, so if you invest in using
this, it might not pay off for all that long.
- These diffs give you *only the latest revision* of each page in namespace
0. No full history.
- You have to keep the old dump file around.
- The tool reads and *unzips* the old dump each time. bunzip2 is slow, so *you
may want to keep reference XML in uncompressed form*, or (better)
compressed with gzip or lzop.
- On Windows, dltp unzips at slower than native speed, so there's even more
reason to store your source file uncompressed.
- No matter what, the old file can take a while to read through; *5-25
minutes to expand the file, depending on how your reference XML is stored,
is entirely plausible.*
- It uses adds-changes dumps, so it doesn't do anything to account for
deletions or oversighting.
- *It's new, non-battle-tested software, so caveat emptor.*
So, I'm curious:
- Does this help you, given the caveats? Would you start using, e.g.,
weekly deltas if I posted them?
- If you actually ran the dltp command above, did you have any trouble? How
long did it take?
- If you'd use this, what sort of project are you thinking of on what sort
of machine? (A public site hosting Wiki content or something else? Big
server, VPS, desktop? Linux or another OS?)
- Which wiki (enwiki, etc.) would you want diffs for?
Other than that the source is out there and anyone can use it, I'm not
promising to post deltas or anything now (since I don't know if folks would
rather wait on official delta dumps, etc.). But interested to see if
there's any potential use here.
Best,
Randall