Presto! Wow, what just happened? Was that a magic trick? Well there is no magic trick here today, but what we do have is the latest in the Fedora 11 Podcast Series, an interview with Fedora contributor Jonathan Dieter on one of the coolest new features on Fedora 11 – presto! Presto allows you to use deltarpms to download only binary ‘diffs’ from whatever packages you already have on your system. For example, if only one file in a released update was changed, all you would be downloading would be that one changed file as opposed to the whole new RPM. Starting in Fedora 11 you can use presto and the yum-presto plugin to enable this functionality when downloading updates.

Presto with Jonathan Dieter [7.2MB Ogg Vorbis]

Remember when I said no magic was involved? We actually did have to use some magic to record this podcast because Jon lives far far away–in Lebanon! Using some of that good ol’ Fedora voodoo we were able to get Jon’s thoughts on Presto, how it and deltarpms work, how this idea came to be and what working in and being a Fedora contributor has meant and continues to mean to him and just a little bit about what’s goin’ on in Lebanon. Just another example of how great people all around the world come together to build a project, a community and a home called Fedora.