Actually it was OpenOffice that got me started on this in the first place: bsdiff of openoffice.org-i18n-1.1.2-10.i386.rpm (in the FC3/i386 distribution) with openoffice.org-i18n-1.1.2-11.5.fc3.i386.rpm in the updates. The resulting diff file was 1MB (compared to 166MB for the RPM)! Two notes on this: 1) the comparison was done on the cpio archive generated with rpm2cpio. 2) bsdiff needs *lots* of memory to generate the diff (patching is not so resource intensive), so I had to split the cpio into 20MB chunks and do the comparisons on the chunks. If I was actually able to do the comparison on the entire file I suspect that the resulting diff would have been significantly smaller than 1MB! So in conclusion: 1MB (or less) for diff vs 166MB for full RPM. I agree with Jeff: a stand alone system that can demonstrate the benefits would be a good first step. Joe. On Wed, 09 Mar 2005 19:32:10 +0100, Kyrre Ness Sjobak <kyrre@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > But a request to the original poster (or anybody interested): could you > do a binary diff between two openoffice versions, and post how big they > where, and how big the diff is? Pluss which versions, and how many steps > (versions) between them?
