RE: Xdelta?

From: Ben Collins-Sussman [mailto:sussman@collab.net]
>Billy Tanksley <btanksley@hifn.com> writes:

>> Have we looked at the XDelta differencing engine? It's
>> licensed under a
>> BSD-like license, so it should work for us. Some people
>> mentioned rsync; xdelta uses an rsync-like protocol.
>> http://www.xcf.berkeley.edu/~jmacd/xdelta.html

>Karl spoke to the author of xdelta over a year ago. For some reason,
>it wasn't a good fit for this project.

I suppose that'll do :-). I like how it can manage binary deltas as well as
text ones, though; I don't like how most VCSes distinguish between binary
and text (and threaten to destroy binary files).

>IIRC, the xdelta code wasn't
>librarized (the way our svndiff algorithm is), and the author had no
>interest in doing so.

It's librarized now, and BSD'ed.

>He was only offering a complete xdelta-based
>filesystem, which we didn't want.

He's still offering that; he calls it XDFS. However, looking at his
webpage, it looks like XDFS is a new thing, currently in beta. In the
original version, he implemented xdelta's interface as diff and patch-like
command-line apps.

At any rate, though, I'm not planning on crusading for xdelta; I'm very
happy with subversion's progress and plans.

-Billy

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@subversion.tigris.org
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:44 2006