planet.osm diffs

hi,
I would like to use planet.osm data for something I am working on and keep it up2date, but would like to avoid downloading the now 10gig+ files every week. For various reasons I decided the planetdiff tool would be my best option, however, looking on the main download server, the most recent diff file I saw was: planet-090319-090325.diff.xml.bz2

It would seem the use of these diffs have been discontinued, however there is nothing on the wiki that states this. Is it true that they have been discontinued, and if so can somebody explain why? For me it would be much preferable to use planetdiff over osmosis.

thx
-a

Well the daily diffs are up to date, aren’t they?
http://planet.openstreetmap.org/daily/

They are, but the main tool of choice to process those is osmosis.

@stonemonk: The diffs you were looking at were indeed discontinued in favour of the newer format, the .osc.gz files.

okay, thx for the info. i guess thats about what i expected, though i think it is kind of a shame. i mean, osmosis is definitely a cool tool, but for this specialized task, i am sure planetdiff would have been a lot faster. nice that is was such a simple pure c codebase. currently i dont have Java (or very much memory) on my target machine which is why i was asking.

the .osc format actually looks nearly the same as that used by planet diff except that it adds a modify cmd whereas planetdiff represented modifications as a combination of remove, and then add. i don’t suppose the original author of planetdiff (or anyone else) would like to update it to use .osc, lol? okay, maybe i can try to do it myself… and for time being i will fetch full planet files but at low frequency (once a month), if that seems okay?

thx
-a

You’ll be I/O bound for most of the process, so any added overhead within osmosis compared to planetdiff might well be hardly noticeable.