I apologise - a quick Google and read at the Gentoo docs says that rsync is the mechanism used by Gentoo for updates. You just rsync against the latest tree. So stupid thing to say on the Fedora list - get yourself a Gentoo CD via mail order, and hve a look at it. It might be the thing for you, as Gentoo works by downloading the source and recompiling for your machine. And rsync will just upload the chnages (just like patches). I wonder how much bandwidth is used each night for the rsync updates compared to an RPM based distro?