Huge download for tiny update?

[kLy]

Security updates are important, I know. But the thing is that ubuntu always decides to do minor updates the entire time to core system modules (I'm talking specifically about KDE since I use kubuntu but it might also apply to gnome). For instance every week or two there's a minor update to KDE (say from 3.4.3-0ubuntu2 to 3.4.3-0ubuntu3), now if I want to update this entails re-downloading about 150MB worth of packages: everything from kdecore to akregator.

That seems rather ludicrous. If there is some security issue or bug, I'm sure it's not a systemic one that needs patching of everything down to the last tiny utility in KDE. I'm sure there's only certain changes in certain apps, not the enormous entirety of KDE. Surely, there can be some version updates (eg. from ubuntu2 to ubuntu3) without the need to download a new binary if nothing's changed for that binary? Or maybe some way to patch minor fixes using binary patches?

I came from Gentoo and there's always source patches which are easily implemented with diffs. This would make updates only tiny downloads of a few KB. Is it possible to have binary patches the way many Windoze apps do it?

Thanks

[aysiu]

I don't know. In Gnome, I've found quite the opposite--despite all my sudo apt-get upgrade-ing of late, there have been no updates the past week or so.