(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

EDelta is a fast (linear time) XDelta-style binary differ, but optimized for executables that have a very systematic way of changing between versions. It has not been thoroughly evaluated so far, but on one example (two versions of Vim) it produces a 30kB delta where XDelta needs 250kB. My personal use for edelta is to quickly deploy Linux kernels from my development-laptop to my test-machines, especially when working over my slow ADSL line at home. I frequently see factor of 100 speedups compared to shipping the whole file.

http://www.diku.dk/hjemmesider/ansatte/jacobg/edelta/

I haven't done a lot of testing on this, but it could be useful for someone wanting to do on the fly updates for puppy, or even to patch Barry's bones version control to get smaller patches.

the page is 404 now - here is a new link to source
https://distfiles.macports.org/edelta/

That's interesting, I missed your original post in this thread.

I have downloaded it, will have a play.

i only looked it up because I saw your recent post about xdelta. Since it's page is gone I couldn't find it unless I added "technosaurus" to the search. Anyhow I wanted to compare it to bsdiff and xdelta and do a simple implementation using a mmap of both file versions with the old file as a primary dictionary and a secondary dictionary built into the diff such that positive offsets reference the original file and negative offsets reference the one inside the diff itself. That way i can use any type of compression... it may produce larger diffs, but should be relatively quick.

I just discovered that edelta is in T2. There is also a patch:

http://t2-project.org/packages/edelta.html

Which probably means it is in the T2 repository, yes it is here:

http://dl.t2-project.org/mirror/9.0/e/