Re: [Gnu-arch-users] EDelta

[Jacob Gorm Hansen]

Tom Lord wrote:
> Full ACK and thank you.  I know of no *immediate* application
> for tools in this category in Arch but I also know of several
> tentative design discussions that will, if fully played out,
> create a need for exactly this sort of tool.  So I am excited but
> reserved about exploring your results.
>
> Is Edelta a longer-term project or "merely" a significant
> result along your way?  If longer-term: is there a mailing list?

What happened is that I got the idea on the way home from a conference 
in 2003, and started hacking up the code on the plane. I spent a few 
more weeks working on it full time, then got sidetracked by working on 
Xen and OS migration, as my research area is systems rather than 
compression algorithms.

The reason I decided to release EDelta more widely was to see if I am 
really the only one who thinks this could be a useful tool. I suppose I 
can setup a mailing list, or, if the Arch community is OK with it, I 
could point interested users to the Arch-users list for further 
discussion and announcements? Another option would be to try to convince 
the xdelta-people into extending their algorithm with similar functionality.

Another idea that I have is to package several versions of the same 
program binary as EDelta-deltas combined with a base exe. E.g. have

(./configure && make)  and  (./configure --enable-featureX && make)

in the same tar.gz or .deb, and then use EDelta to patch to the relevant 
version at installation time. This would allow Gentoo/ports-like 
flexibility and performance in a binary distribution such as Debian.

Jacob