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using bsdiff to shorten cygwin updates


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http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2004-04/msg00632.html
Chris Jefferson wrote:

| A much more useful addition I believe would be for cygwin to be
| able to download patches to previously downloaded packages (in the
| basic case when you've kept the .tar.bz2 files it downloaded, which
|  it does by default).

Yes, that would be a very welcome feature I guess. At least for me, it
would be...

| particuarily I have a reimplementation of bsdiff hanging around
| somewhere, which seems to be the best binary diffing program
| around, but is under some strange anti-GPL licence

I guess you are talking about BSDPL[1] (BSD Protection License), then
that is the "original" version AFAIK, and not a reimplementation.

As bsdiff's author (Colin Percival) says itself on the official
website[2], bsdiff is based on ideas mainly taken from N. Jesper
Larsson's qsufsort[3], which have a license that seems very BSD to me
(BSD, not BSDPL).
Maybe it would be not-too-difficult to write something similiar (but
different) to bsdiff.

IANAL at all, but AFAIK you can of course read Colin's paper, but you
can't read his source and then produce something non
license-compatible with it.

~ Lapo

1. http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/work/colin.percival/source/BSDPL.html
2. http://www.daemonology.net/bsdiff/
3. http://www.larsson.dogma.net/qsufsort.c
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