Re: Adding bsdiff to the base system

From: Colin Percival (colin.percival_at_wadham.ox.ac.uk)
Date: 03/31/05

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    Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2005 02:29:50 -0800
To: Ceri Davies <ceri@submonkey.net>

    Ceri Davies wrote:
    > On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 03:47:55PM -0800, Colin Percival wrote:
    >> I'd like to add bsdiff/bspatch into the base system.
    >
    > While it's probably easy to guess from the names, can you explain what
    > they are?

    Oops. bsdiff constructs a "binary diff", and is designed to produce
    particularly small patches when the two files differ by a large number
    of substitutions relative to the number of insertions and deletions
    (this is significant since executable files tend to change in this
    manner, as a result of linking object files together). Compared to
    other "binary diff" tools, bsdiff often produces patches 3-5 times
    smaller; however, it has the disadvantage of being slower and rather
    more memory-intensive than other tools.

    bspatch is the opposite of bsdiff -- it takes the "old" file, the
    binary diff file, and produces the "new" file.

    Colin Percival
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