PY_RDIFF

A python module providing a (thin) ctypes wrapper around librsync. Inspiration for this module comes primarily from python-librsync. Librsync API was researched from: http://rproxy.samba.org/doxygen/librsync/refman.pdf

Like python-librsync, py_rdiff provides identical functionality to the linux command rdiff http://linux.die.net/man/1/rdiff, in that the main actions that can be performed are:

• creating a file signature (py_rdiff.rysnc_sig)
• creating a file delta (py_rdiff.rsync_delta)
• patching the original file to become identical to the destination file (py_rdiff.rsync_patch)

There are some differences between py_rdiff and python-librsync. You will notice that there is a lot less code in this module. The main reason is that python-librsync makes use of librsync asyncronous / non-blocking capabilities (referred to as "jobs" in librsync terminology). However, the author still wraps the jobs in while loops, waiting for the call to complete before exiting. Py_rdiff makes use of the native librsync *_file family of library calls to achieve the same result but in less code.

Example of usage:

$ python

>>> import py_rdiff
>>> completed, sig_file = py_rdiff.rsync_sig('test.txt')

>>> completed
True

>>> sig_file
'dd18bf3a8e0a2a3e53e2661c7fb53534.sig

>>> if completed:
...     completed, delta_file = py_rdiff.rsync_delta(sig_file, 'test2.txt')


>>> completed
True

>>> delta_file
'dd18bf3a8e0a2a3e53e2661c7fb53534.delta'

>>> if completed:
...     completed = py_rdiff.rsync_patch(delta_file,'test.txt', 'patched_test.txt')

>>> completed
(True, None)

$ cat test.txt 
asdqwezxcrfv

$ cat test2.txt 
qwerty qwerty qwerty

$ cat patched_test.txt 
qwerty qwerty qwerty