Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2005 02:29:50 -0800 From: Colin Percival <colin.percival@wadham.ox.ac.uk> To: Ceri Davies <ceri@submonkey.net> Cc: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Adding bsdiff to the base system Message-ID: <424BD11E.1090007@wadham.ox.ac.uk> In-Reply-To: <20050331101621.GL10485@submonkey.net> References: <424B3AAB.6090200@wadham.ox.ac.uk> <20050331101621.GL10485@submonkey.net>
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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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