binary patches?

[Fabian Keil]

Wojciech Puchar <wojtek at tensor.gdynia.pl> wrote:

> > 	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.

Is that a guess or did you actually test and verify this?

Fabian
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