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Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 16:20:00 +0000
From: Vince <jhary@unsane.co.uk>
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To: Gary Kline <kline@tao.thought.org>
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Cc: FreeBSD Mailing List <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: binary patches?
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Gary Kline wrote:
> 	Regarding most (or many) of the port changes--say, upgrading
> 	foo-2.1.9_5 to foo-2.1.9_6, if  the upgrade could be done by
> 	downloading a binary diff file, could the resulting
> 	/usr/local/bin/foo-2.1.9_6 be achieved by downloading a 
> 	relatively small binary patch?  Seems to me that smaller scale
> 	upgrades could be done this way in preference to re-compiling
> 	ports or downloading entire pacakes.  --Same would go for any
> 	dependencies.
> 
> 	Why is this a bad idea!
> 
> 	gary
portsnap works on this basis as does freebsd-update, see
http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-update/
I can imagine it could get horribly complex, but using
http://www.daemonology.net/bsdiff/ i guess its potentially possible.
Colin Percival would be a good person to talk to if you're thinking of
implementing this, since he wrote the tools referenced above.


Vince