XDelta NEWS -- history of user-visible changes. -*- Text -*-

$Date: 2004/01/05 18:54:21 $

$ReleaseVersion: 1.1.3 $

Please send bug reports to xdelta-bugs@XCF.Berkeley.EDU. See the file

`README' for a description of how to report bugs.



** Changes since version 1.1.2

* Correct error message format for the case when gzread fails trying

to automatically decompress a corrupted GZIP file. The situation

itself--corrupt GZIP files--should be dealt with the -p (--pristine)

option, which disables GZIP file recognition. Reported by Ben

Escoto.

* Apply a patch from Klaus Dittrich for building on HPUX with the

native compiler. There is now a script called "contrib/build_hpux".



** Changes since version 1.1.1

* This code release is a distant fork of the 2.0 release. It will

hopefully be replaced.

* When 'patch' supplies its default TO file name recorded in the

delta, it still generates a unique file name to avoid overwriting an

existing copy. Use the 'xdelta info' command to see what file names

are contained in the delta.

* The code for writing patches to stdout was broken in the case where

gzip compression is used. Writing patches to stdout has therefore

been disabled. The problem is a limitation in the gzdopen/gzwrite

functions provided by zlib--you cannot determine how many bytes have

been written to the file descriptor without dup-ing the FD

beforehand and then lseek-ing afterwards, which does not work

correctly if the output file is not seekable.

* By default, Xdelta uses a hard-coded 16 byte block size. If you're

working with large files, try #undef XDELTA_HARDCODE_SIZE in

xdelta.h then use -s BLOCKSIZE (--blocksize=BLOCKSIZE), which should

be a power of 2.

* New test program in the 'test' subdirectory, which runs comparisons

against "diff --rcs -a" and also verifies the "xdelta patch"

command.

* Incorporate DJGPP patches from Richard Dawe <richdawe@bigfoot.com>.

You can find his versions directly at:

ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/gnu/djgpp/v2apps/xdlt112b.zip

ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/gnu/djgpp/v2apps/xdlt112s.zip

* Updated xdelta(1) man page.

* Updated autoconf (2.50), automake (1.4-p4), libtool (1.4) scripts,

which includes updated config.guess and config.sub scripts.

* Correct some backward compatibility issues: strcmp() was not being

tested == 0 for formats older than 1.0.4.

* Update GLIB version requirement, now 1.2.8.

* We really need support for 64bit file sizes... perhaps the next

version?



** Changes since version 1.1.0

* No one was were able to build the 1.1.0 release because it depended

on a version of glib which will not be distributed for some time.

This version backs out those dependencies and now requires

glib-1.2.1.



** Changes since version 1.0.6

* The 64M limit on file sizes has been lifted. File lengths are now

limited by the size of a 32-bit integer.

* The internal data structures were changed and some of the

experimental bits of the interface have been moved out of libxdelta,

resulting in a simpler interface. Old patch files are still

supported.



** Changes since version 1.0.5

* There are 8 bytes of space in the patch format's header that are

reserved for future use. They are not currently used, but were also

not being initialized, making it possible for two deltas produced in

the same manner to differ. This was exposed by comparing deltas

produced between the same files on Windows and Linux. With this

patch, the results should be identical.



** Changes since version 1.0.4

* The code now compiles natively under Windows. I used MS VC++ 5.0.

It depends on glib and zlib, but I don't feel like documenting

the build process yet. I have had some trouble with the zlib DLLs

and had to build my own, so you can't build it yourself yet. There

is a pre-built version at

ftp://ftp.xcf.berkeley.edu/pub/xdelta/xdelta-1.0.5.win32.zip

* Many changes required to keep Xdelta working with PRCS 2. Mostly

this involved keeping up to date with some code that is shared

between the two. All the shared code is now in the "libedsio"

subdirectory, which stands for "Error Delivery and Serialized IO".



** Changes since version 1.0.3

* Slight change in file format to improve detection of and error

messages regarding corrupt deltas (specifically, those left behing

when an xdelta process is killed while computing a delta). This

means 1.0.0-1.0.3 will not read these new deltas, they will report a

bad magic number.

* Improve several error messages related to corrupt deltas.



** Changes since version 1.0.2

* Fix a few bugs, especially one related to the implementation of -m,

and a couple more which were shaken out by testing on a pair of

emacs releases (~55M each). These changes only affect the xdelta

application, the library is unchanged.

* Add a new command `xdelta info' that lists information about a

delta, for example:

$ xdelta info some.patch

xdelta: version 1.0.3 found patch version 1.0 in some.patch

xdelta: patch contents are compressed

xdelta: patch from: from

xdelta: patch from length: 53309440

xdelta: patch from md5: c0ddcb6904d40da7cf1eae5e6bdbbc01

xdelta: patch to: to

xdelta: patch to length: 55377920

xdelta: patch to md5: 00b3dd4d1a9b450bc5b8991b183013fb

xdelta: patch insert length: 2436426

xdelta: patch inst count: 253649



** Changes since version 1.0.1

* Fix minor typos, and build improvements. There is now a gtk-style

'xdelta-config' program and autoconf macro to locate the library.



** Changes since version 1.0.0

* Fix incorrect usage report in --help output for the patch command.

* Abort when directories are specified, there is no recursive mode.

* Now requires glib-1.1.5.

* The new ``pristine'' option (-p, --pristine) disables

automatic uncompression of compressed input data, and is for use

when data integrity is being externally verified. This enables a

tool written by Manish Singh (yosh@gimp.org) to compute deltas

between the Debian dpkg utility's .deb format.

* A draft paper describing its algorithms, rational, advanced

features, and future work is now available at

ftp://ftp.xcf.berkeley.edu/pub/xdelta/xdelta.ps.

** Changes since version 0.24

* This version is a complete rewrite, and removes some of the features

available in version 0. Featuring:

- A completely new and much improved library interface. This code is

a complete rewrite.

- An optimized implementation of the XDelta algorithm.

- A drastic memory reduction.

- The library stream-processes files where possible and uses a page-

based interface when seeking is required (allowing the application

to run in bounded memory on large files).

- There is now a little documentation. A man page and the

beginnings of texinfo documentation.

- Includes several advanced features used by PRCS version 2, see the

documentation for more information.

- Includes a minimal implementation of the Rsync algorithm, also used

by PRCS version 2.

- Uses an abstract file handle interface, the library has very few

system dependencies. This allows the library client to compute

MD5 checksums in a single-pass as XDelta reads files, use pre-

computed checksums, or disable checksum verification entirely.

- Compression and file-unarchival have been removed from the library,

these features are orthogonal.

At the application level:

- GDBM archive experiment has been removed. This functionality is

implemented directly in PRCS version 2 using the present library

interface.

- Base 64 encoding support has been removed for technical reasons.

- Can no longer accept patches from stdin, due to the same

technical reasons (the patch instruction index is stored at the

end of the file, requiring seeking).

- Automatic detection and un-archival of RPM and dpkg file formats

has been removed. Automatic uncompression of gzipped files is

still supported.

- The GIMP plugin is no longer supported.