devel/xdelta - The NetBSD Packages Collection

The delta generator portion of this program is a delta algorithm which
searches for substring matches between the files and then outputs
instructions to reconstruct the new file from the old file.  It produces a
set of copy/insert instructions that tell how to reconstruct the file as a
sequence of copies from the FROM file and inserts from the delta itself.
In this regard, the program is much closer to a compression program than
to a diff program.  However, the delta is not "compressed", in that the
delta's entropy H(P) will be very similar to the entropy of the portions
of the TO file not found within the FROM file.  The delta will compress
just as well as the TO file will.  This is a fundamentally different
method of computing deltas than in the traditional "diff" program.  The
diff program and its variants use a least-common-subsequence (LCS)
algorithm to find a list of inserts and deletes that will modify the FROM
file into the TO file.  LCS is more expensive to compute and is sometimes
more useful, especially to the human reader.  Since LCS is a fairly
expensive algorithm, diff programs usually divide the input files into
newline-separated "atoms" before computing a delta.  This is a fine
approximation for text files, but not binary files.