Adding bsdiff to the base system - Max Laier - org.freebsd.freebsd-arch

17 messages in org.freebsd.freebsd-archAdding bsdiff to the base system

From	Sent On	Attachments
Colin Percival	Mar 30, 2005 3:47 pm
Ceri Davies	Mar 31, 2005 2:16 am
Alexey Dokuchaev	Mar 31, 2005 2:24 am
Colin Percival	Mar 31, 2005 2:33 am
Colin Percival	Mar 31, 2005 2:47 am
Robert Watson	Mar 31, 2005 9:06 pm
Mario Hoerich	Apr 1, 2005 5:43 am
Dan Nelson	Apr 1, 2005 7:27 am
Garance A Drosihn	Apr 1, 2005 12:16 pm
Alex Burke	Apr 1, 2005 1:18 pm
Colin Percival	Apr 1, 2005 2:12 pm
Max Laier	Apr 1, 2005 3:26 pm
John Baldwin	Apr 2, 2005 12:15 pm
Ceri Davies	Apr 4, 2005 8:45 am
Olaf Wagner	Apr 6, 2005 11:49 pm
Colin Percival	Apr 7, 2005 12:35 am
John Polstra	Apr 8, 2005 8:11 am

Subject:	Adding bsdiff to the base system
From:	Max Laier (ma...@love2party.net)
Date:	Apr 1, 2005 3:26:21 pm
List:	org.freebsd.freebsd-arch

On Saturday 02 April 2005 00:12, Colin Percival wrote:

In the last episode (Apr 01), Mario Hoerich said:

Not that it's important, but the names probably aren't the best possible choice, as 'bsdiff' seems to suggest 'BSD licensed diff'.

No, it would be "BSD licensed iff". :-)

At 9:28 AM -0600 4/1/05, Dan Nelson wrote:

Yes, that's what I assumed this thread was about for the first couple posts. bdiff/bpatch sound like better names. What's the 's' stand for?

Err... nothing. Or rather, I'm not sure what it stands for. I was looking for a name for a diff tool which worked on "binary software" (or more generally, files with lots of "byte-substitutions"), and which uses "bytewise subtraction" as part of its encoding process... (I'm sure you can think of other possible meanings of "bs", as well.)

Though it's "*B*inary *S*mall diff" ... and I like that name!

Garance A Drosihn wrote:

I was also confused by the names at first. How about just 'bindiff' and 'binpatch'? These do sound like useful utilities to add, now that I understand what they are...

When I first wrote this code, I called it "bdiff". Soon thereafter, it was pointed out to me that there was a bit of a namespace collision -- the name "bdiff" -- and the name "bindiff", which was my second choice -- had each been used for several different (not very good) binary diff tools already.

So I looked for a name which hadn't already been used by several other people, and settled on "bsdiff" / "bspatch" as a compromise between being descriptive and avoiding the possibility of getting confused with another program.

This is all rather immaterial at this point, however: It's far too late to change the name now.

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