binary patches?

[Wojciech Puchar]

> 	Regarding most (or many) of the port changes--say, upgrading
> 	foo-2.1.9_5 to foo-2.1.9_6, if  the upgrade could be done by
> 	downloading a binary diff file, could the resulting
> 	/usr/local/bin/foo-2.1.9_6 be achieved by downloading a
> 	relatively small binary patch?  Seems to me that smaller scale
> 	upgrades could be done this way in preference to re-compiling
> 	ports or downloading entire pacakes.  --Same would go for any
> 	dependencies.
>
> 	Why is this a bad idea!
>
because if you change say 5 lines in program source of  1MB binary 
program, resulting new 1MB binary will be MUCH different 
byte-by-byte mostly because of address shifting so lots of pointers to 
code (or data, rodata)  will change. so diff will be big.

recompiling is OK anyway, because you always recompile to your machine 
(assuming you set CPUTYPE in make.conf)