Idle Hacking

bsdiff and bspatch are great little tools for creating patches of binary files. I used them for the updater in SimoHealth and I believe firefox and chromium use them to deliver application updates. I’m thinking they may be very useful for backups and archiving.   I extracted out the bsdiff and bspatch binaries into an easy to use ruby interface.    For now the ruby interface is exactly the same interface as the command line counterparts meaning all patching and diffing is done via files.  E.g.

bsdiff oldfile newfile patchfile

in ruby would be:

BSDiff.diff('oldfilepath', 'newfilepath', 'patchfilepath')

and patching would be:

bspatch oldfile newfile patchfile

in ruby would be:

BSDiff.patch('oldfilepath', 'newfilepath', 'patchfilepath')

Software bsdiff, bspatch, extensions, Ruby