Adding bsdiff to the base system

[Olaf Wagner]

In article <424BD4FB.1050304 at wadham.ox.ac.uk> you wrote:
> Alexey Dokuchaev wrote:
> I'll conceed that portsnap is not yet used by the majority of our user
> base; but I think that is largely because portsnap is still quite new,
> and thus relatively unknown.  At present portsnap is the only mechanism
> available by which most users can securely maintain an up-to-date copy
> of the FreeBSD ports tree; it also provides some other advantages over
> cvsup (reduced bandwidth and ports INDEX/INDEX-5/INDEX-6 files).  Since

Just out of interest: how does it do that? I've not tested it yet,
but what intelligence or knowledge does it use to be so much more
efficient (1/10) than CVSup? (I myself haven't found anything as
efficient as CVSup yet, at least for replicating CVS repositories...)

> portsnap and its dependencies will not significantly bloat the base
> system -- portsnap + bsdiff weigh in at a combined 54kB -- I think it
> is a sufficiently useful tool to justify inclusion.
-- 
/\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
|| Olaf Wagner           | wagner(at)luthien.in-berlin.de (priv.)|
|| Cranachstrasse 7      | wagner(at)elego.de (business)         |
|| D-12157 Berlin        | phone: +49 30  85 60 26 70            | 
|| Germany / Deutschland | fax:   +49 30  85 58 01 88            | 
\/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////