https://github.com/sisong/HDiffPatch I've compared the tool to xdelta, and it's light years ahead. Would be great to have it in Gentoo :)
Patrick, could you explain/list what is so much better? Note: * No other distribution has this package for now. https://repology.org/projects/?search=hdiffpatch * Upstream works on tickets in Chinese language: https://github.com/sisong/HDiffPatch/issues
Hi Jonas, happy to :) I wanted to create a diff from one large Docker image (22 GB) to another (23 GB), and expected a result in the low single-digit GB range, ideally even <1 GB, because I know lots of layers had been rearranged, but the actual data wasn't all that different. So I tried xdelta and got the following results: Command line Diff (GB) Time (h:mm:ss) xdelta -e 8 0:50:29 xdelta -e -B524288000 -W16777216 -I0 -9 7.7 1:22:03 not happy with the result and processing time, and also seeing that it only used 1/8 of my cores, I went to search for better binary diff tools and found hdiffpatch, which produced the following results: Command line Diff (GB) Time hdiffz -s-64m -p-8 -c-pzlib 6 0:05:34 hdiffz -s-64k -p-8 -c-pzlib 2.9 0:03:53 hdiffz -s-64 -p-8 -c-pzlib 2.4 0:13:06 (>6GB RAM usage) hdiffz -s-4k -p-8 -c-lzma2 1.8 0:13:48 (~1.2 GB RAM usage) I was quite happy with the last result and also the time it took to create and apply the diff (which took 2m15s). I also found it peculiar that the author has lots of code comments in Chinese, and is maintaining his own tickets in Chinese as well. He's probably not very comfortable in English, but still seems to be making an effort (README, help text etc. is all in decent English, and when someone opens a ticket in English, he replies in English as well. Given that the first commits are from 2013 I also was surprised to not find it packaged in any distro, yet. But then again, he provides pre-built binaries that just work without any deps, so I guess whoever needed the tool just directly took his binaries... I've tried to build from source (plain Makefile) but encountered an issue which was easy to fix. I've reported it just now - see https://github.com/sisong/HDiffPatch/issues/279
(The problem I had building it was due to bzip2 lib + headers not being available on my Ubuntu box, btw.)
