Date: Fri, 01 Apr 2005 14:12:23 -0800 From: Colin Percival <colin.percival@wadham.ox.ac.uk> To: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> Cc: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Adding bsdiff to the base system Message-ID: <424DC747.4020604@wadham.ox.ac.uk> In-Reply-To: <p0621020fbe735b39c6b3@[128.113.24.47]> References: <424B3AAB.6090200@wadham.ox.ac.uk> <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1050401045710.51321C-100000@fledge.watson.org> <20050401134347.GA6676@Pandora.MHoerich.de> <20050401152805.GA4564@dan.emsphone.com> <p0621020fbe735b39c6b3@[128.113.24.47]>
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>> In the last episode (Apr 01), Mario Hoerich said: >>> Not that it's important, but the names probably aren't the best >>> possible choice, as 'bsdiff' seems to suggest 'BSD licensed diff'. No, it would be "BSD licensed iff". :-) > At 9:28 AM -0600 4/1/05, Dan Nelson wrote: >> Yes, that's what I assumed this thread was about for the first >> couple posts. bdiff/bpatch sound like better names. What's the >> 's' stand for? Err... nothing. Or rather, I'm not sure what it stands for. I was looking for a name for a diff tool which worked on "binary software" (or more generally, files with lots of "byte-substitutions"), and which uses "bytewise subtraction" as part of its encoding process... (I'm sure you can think of other possible meanings of "bs", as well.) Garance A Drosihn wrote: > I was also confused by the names at first. How about just > 'bindiff' and 'binpatch'? These do sound like useful utilities > to add, now that I understand what they are... When I first wrote this code, I called it "bdiff". Soon thereafter, it was pointed out to me that there was a bit of a namespace collision -- the name "bdiff" -- and the name "bindiff", which was my second choice -- had each been used for several different (not very good) binary diff tools already. So I looked for a name which hadn't already been used by several other people, and settled on "bsdiff" / "bspatch" as a compromise between being descriptive and avoiding the possibility of getting confused with another program. This is all rather immaterial at this point, however: It's far too late to change the name now. Colin Percival
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