A more efficient up2date service using binary diffs
Joe Desbonnet
jdesbonnet at gmail.com
Wed Mar 9 19:03:11 UTC 2005
Actually it was OpenOffice that got me started on this in the first place:
bsdiff of
openoffice.org-i18n-1.1.2-10.i386.rpm (in the FC3/i386 distribution)
with
openoffice.org-i18n-1.1.2-11.5.fc3.i386.rpm in the updates.
The resulting diff file was 1MB (compared to 166MB for the RPM)!
Two notes on this:
1) the comparison was done on the cpio archive generated with rpm2cpio.
2) bsdiff needs *lots* of memory to generate the diff (patching is not
so resource intensive), so I had to split the cpio into 20MB chunks
and do the comparisons
on the chunks. If I was actually able to do the comparison on the
entire file I suspect that the resulting diff would have been
significantly smaller than 1MB!
So in conclusion: 1MB (or less) for diff vs 166MB for full RPM.
I agree with Jeff: a stand alone system that can demonstrate the
benefits would be a good first step.
Joe.
On Wed, 09 Mar 2005 19:32:10 +0100, Kyrre Ness Sjobak
<kyrre at solution-forge.net> wrote:
> But a request to the original poster (or anybody interested): could you
> do a binary diff between two openoffice versions, and post how big they
> where, and how big the diff is? Pluss which versions, and how many steps
> (versions) between them?
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