Re: [Gnu-arch-users] GNU Arch 2.0 and binary files

[Adrian Irving-Beer]

On Thu, Oct 20, 2005 at 05:25:07PM -0700, Andy Tai wrote:

> Previously there were discussions of how to efficiently store binary
> files, like using xdelta or such.

I found "rzip" the other day:

   The principal advantage of rzip is that it has an effective
   history buffer of 900 Mbyte.  This means it can find matching
   pieces of the input file over huge distances compared to other
   commonly used compression programs.  The gzip program by
   comparison uses a history buffer of 32 kbyte and bzip2 uses a
   history buffer of 900 kbyte.

Biggest disadvantage is that it isn't streamable; presumably, it has
to work on seekable datasets.  But if one replaced zlib with rzip for
compressing the tarballs, presumably one could get similar or even
better performance to a binary delta without losing information or
changing the format.

Mind you, a binary delta would be more in keeping with tla's ASCII
tradition, where a file is a sum of its patches.

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