Adding bsdiff to the base system

[Colin Percival]

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