Request for Comments: updating RPMs using binary deltas

[Leonard den Ottolander]

Hello Toshio,

> I believe it
> ended when Elliot Lee posted some code that used xdelta to do the
> differencing and we figured out that we couldn't reconstruct the rpm
> packages so that the gpg (pgp then) signatures were valid.

That the signing is an issue which makes binary patching rather
difficult was also the conclusion that I drew in a related discussion on
the Fedora list lately
(http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-January/msg02157.html).
Note that I say difficult, not impossible.

But one thing that gets overseen in this discussion is that the binary
patches that SUSE distributes are actually archives containing
(selected) patched binaries. Such "binary patches" are much easier to
implement.

Bye,
Leonard.

-- 
mount -t life -o ro /dev/dna /genetic/research