DelphiDabbler's Blog

Well, it's been a long haul to get this little diff and patch suite from v0.2.x to v1.0. 22 years and 2 days ago I released my first attempt at translating Stefan Reuther's bdiff / bpatch utilities from C to Pascal. Stefan's original code was first published in 1999. This was v0.2.1(pas). Then, 1 day short of 2½ years ago the first v1.0 beta was released. 1 year, 1 month and 1 week ago the release candidate was made available. In the related blog post I said I was almost there, "almost there" meaning "about a year away", obviously. And today, v1.0.0 has finally been let out into the wild. Slow and steady does it! What's the difference between the release candidate and the final release? Not much. There are no new features, just a bit of refactoring, extra error checking and a new test. I've moved over to compiling with Delphi 13 & tweaked the docs. If you're not sure what these utilities do, then read the man pages:  BDiff  /  BPatc...

It's only taken 21 years, but we're approaching the release of v1.0 of the BDiff/BPatch utilities . I don't want to rush it though (😉) so I've just put out a release candidate. There are various tweaks since beta 2, but the headline is that the programs are now available in 64 bit versions in addition to 32 bit. I'd been putting this off because I expected trouble, but everything happily re-compiled with the Delphi 64 bit Windows compiler and just worked. No changes required. Phew. If you want to read about the other tweaks then take a look at the change log . Not sure what these utilities do, then read the man pages: BDiff / BPatch . ✅ You can get RC1 from the GitHub release page .

It's just 20 years since I translated Stefan Reuther's bdiff & bpatch into Delphi Pascal and released v0.2.1(pas) Since then it's crept up to v0.2.9, released earlier this year. So maybe it's about time I admitted that the code's pretty stable and moved to v1! Well, almost. I've converted the code to Delphi 11 and done a lot of refactoring, so I'm wary about possibly having introduced bugs in the process. So it's been decided to go for a safety v1.0.0-beta release before finally releasing v1.0 . Oh, and I've dropped the custom license in favour of the BSD 3-clause license. BDiff & BPatch are maintained in the delphidabbler/bdiff repo on GitHub. You can find v1.0.0-beta on the GitHub releases page . There's no installer. Just copy BDiff.exe and BPatch.exe  from the release zip file to some directory on your system. Removable drives are fine too. Neither program modifies the host system in any way, so to uninstall you just need to delete ...

After a bit of a programming hiatus, I've finally got round to a bit of coding and implemented a few tweaks to my Pascal implementation of Stefan Reuther's bdiff. This is largely a refactoring and documentation revision update. The only tiny functional change is that I've finally changed the build date reported by the --version command to ISO format. It's only taken the best part of 20 years to take these programs from v0.2.0 to v0.2.9. You never know, but maybe v1.0 might come out this year too! We're getting close. Anyhow, if you want more info head over to the project's page on my website. To download the binaries go to the release page on GitHub.