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Binary diff/patch utility version 4.3, written by
Copyright 2003-2005 Colin Percival <cperciva@freebsd.org>
bzip2/libbzip2 version 1.0.4 of 20 December 2006
Copyright (C) 1996-2006 Julian Seward <jseward@bzip.org>
This is a quick native Win32-Port by
Andreas John <dynacore@tesla.inka.de>
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Quick overview from the homepage of these tools:
http://www.daemonology.net/bsdiff/
Binary diff/patch utility
bsdiff and bspatch are tools for building and applying patches to binary
files. By using suffix sorting (specifically, Larsson and Sadakane's
qsufsort) and taking advantage of how executable files change, bsdiff
routinely produces binary patches 50-80% smaller than those produced by
Xdelta, and 15% smaller than those produced by .RTPatch (a $2750/seat
commercial patch tool).
These programs were originally named bdiff and bpatch, but the large
number of other programs using those names lead to confusion; I'm not
sure if the "bs" in refers to "binary software" (because bsdiff produces
exceptionally small patches for executable files) or "bytewise
subtraction" (which is the key to how well it performs). Feel free to
offer other suggestions.
bsdiff and bspatch use bzip2; by default they assume it is in /usr/bin.
bsdiff is quite memory-hungry. It requires max(17*n,9*n+m)+O(1) bytes of
memory, where n is the size of the old file and m is the size of the new
file. bspatch requires n+m+O(1) bytes.
bsdiff runs in O((n+m) log n) time; on a 200MHz Pentium Pro, building a
binary patch for a 4MB file takes about 90 seconds. bspatch runs in
O(n+m) time; on the same machine, applying that patch takes about two
seconds.
Providing that off_t is defined properly, bsdiff and bspatch support
files of up to 2^61-1 = 2Ei-1 bytes.
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