Adding bsdiff to the base system

[Max Laier]

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.
>
> Colin Percival
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