3 ms·

Wouldn't it be better if applications were distributed in source form? Minimizing patches size would be trivial then. I wonder why noone seems to have thought

• pronoiac 17y ago
  You might look into Gentoo Linux. Building everything from source multiplies the disk space & time involved in upgrades.
• djcapelis 17y ago
  Source is often larger and you need to keep around the base source to figure out how to apply the diff and get a correct result. What they're doing here is superior to source-based distribution if you care about update size and ease.
• prewett 17y ago
  You would have to make sure that all your users have a (working) version of a compiler that is compatible with the libraries. For C++, this can be a royal pain. Even on Linux, where a compiler can reasonably be expected to exist, there's no way of knowing whether the system's compiler is what you need. And don't even think about Windows, where only developers have a compiler, unless you'd like to ship GCC/mingw with your original app...
• nimrody 17y ago
  There used to be an initiative called ANDF (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_Neutral_Distribution_Format http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_Neutral_Distributi...) which was designed to distribute software in some form of intermediate level code. They got compiled to native code on the user's machine. I guess you could think of LLVM object files as the equivalent today.