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Clarify usage on rdiff(1) man page. #180

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merged 2 commits into from
Nov 25, 2019

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AaronM04
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AaronM04 and others added 2 commits November 17, 2019 13:58
Make the description more generalized and less application specific.
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dbaarda commented Nov 24, 2019

Is that clear enough for you, or do you want me to add a description of signature and delta files?

doc/rdiff.1 Outdated
\fBpatch\fP. To generate a \fIdelta-file\fP which can be used in combination
with \fIold-file\fP to re-generate \fInew-file\fP, use the \fBsignature\fP then
\fBdelta\fP subcommands. The \fIsignature-file\fP file can be discarded
afterward. To re-generate \fInew-file\fP, use the \fBpatch\fP
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I'm not sure how much this clarifies things, and feel like it could be better. The comment "The signature-file file can be discarded afterward" implies that the signature-file is not useful after a delta has been calculated, but there are use-cases where keeping it is useful (like calculating another delta-file for a different new-file later).

A signature-file is a small binary signature of the old-file that can be used to generate a delta-file against a new-file. It is small compared to the whole old-file, so it can be easily transferred and/or stored to calculate a delta-file remotely and/or later against a new-file without access to the original old-file.

A delta-file is a small binary diff file that can be applied to the old-file to update it to the new-file. The delta-files contain only the differences between the old-file and the new-file, so they are generally much smaller than the whole new-file, making them efficient to transfer and/or store to regenerate the new-file remotely and/or later by patching the old-file.

I'll have a crack at writing something better.

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As per AaronM04's reply my modified version of this seems OK, so I'm going to merge this now.

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dbaarda commented Nov 24, 2019

Sorry, I didn't realize my comment was stuck in a pending review until now, so I submitted it. Sorry for the confusion.

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@dbaarda your update looks much clearer. Thanks!

Let me know if there's anything else I need to do.

@dbaarda dbaarda merged commit 6b0d1c6 into librsync:master Nov 25, 2019
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