Do you know Unix/Linux diff(1) tool works? It shows which lines were added and removed between 2 text files, and shows it in the human-readable form. I need the same kind of tool for binary files - except for working on sequences of bytes, not text lines. It still must produce human-readable output (in hex thus).
Note that I don't need cmp -l
which diffs binary files byte by byte and can't detect insertions and removals. Note that I don't need xdelta
or bsdiff
which produce non-human-readable output. Actually, I'm a bit astonished that neither xdelta
nor bsdiff
offer some kind of human-readable representation for patches they produce. IMHO, such option should be there first, and only then an option to produce an efficient binary patch. After all, how the authors of those tools verify them to work right? And don't they think users will want to verify them either, to make sure that they indeed produce sane and minimal patches?