Subject: PATCH gdiff and binary diff

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2006 09:22:57 +0200 (MEST)

Jim Whitehead <[email-masked]> wrote:
Concerning gdiff:
> While IANAL, this appears to be a clear case of public disclosure,  
> with no subsequent patent filing within a year of disclosure. As a  
> result, I believe this technology is now public domain.
So I believe that the IPR stuff of gdiff is settled.
OTOH I want to repeat my recent binary diff proposal with 
	"add from diff" <number of octets> CRLF <octets> CRLF 
and
	"copy from resource" <position> <number of octets> CRLF
E.g. 
c 5 5
a 2
12
c 0 5
I can't imagine that there is any IPR on such an simple and obvious format.
OTOH I think it's easy to implement and powerful enough to be of value.
If nobody disagrees we could add gdiff and this binary patch format to one
of the existing drafts.
I'm currently validating my ObeDAV client with subversion and apache.
By chance anybody from subversion listening who knows whether subversion
uses any diff format when working with or without apache ?

Cheers, Edgar

---

From: Joe Feise <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2006 14:43:15 -0700

> uses any diff format when working with or without apache ?

I forwarded this to one of the subversion developers I know around here,
and here is his answer: 

SVN uses svndiff, which is loosely based on vdelta.  SVN 1.4
introduces svndiff1, which adds a gzip compression.  More info is
available here: 

http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/notes/svndiff 

Subversion will use svndiff on all RA methods: so it's independent of
httpd or svnserve tunneling.