[librsync-devel] Re: state of the rsync nation? (revisited 6/2003 from 11/2000)

[Martin Pool]

On 11 Jun 2003, Donovan Baarda <abo at minkirri.apana.org.au> wrote:

> The vcdiff standard is available as RFC3284, and Josh is listed as one
> of the authors. 

Yes, I've just been reading that.

I seem to remember that it was around as an Internet-Draft when I
started, but it didn't seem clear that it would become standard so I
didn't use it.

> I also had some correspondence with Josh ages ago where he talked about
> how self-referencing delta's can directly do compression of the miss
> data without using things like zlib and by default gives you the
> benefits of rsync's "context compression" without the overheads (rsync
> runs a decompressor _and_ a compressor on the receiving end just to
> regenerate the compressed "hit" context data).

Something possibly similar is mentioned in tridge's thesis.  I was
talking to him a while ago and (iirc) he thought it would be good to
try it again, since it does well with the large amounts of memory and
CPU time that are available on modern machines.

I strongly agree with what you said a while ago about code simplicity
being more valuable than squeezing out every last bit.

-- 
Martin