Courgette meets a dangerous (Red) Bend

Courgette meets a dangerous (Red) Bend

Remember, the patent doesn't cover the implementation. It's just the idea. However much work goes into the implementation, what's being protected by the patent is just the basic concept.

And you do start with .o files, every day. The relocation thing is staring you in the face every time you do a build. When you come up with the 'modified program' mentioned in this update process, you're just stepping backwards a step in the build process. You're not actually doing anything particularly new and exciting.

There's a very similar trick with compression. Packages (RPM/deb/etc.) are generally compressed, and when doing deltas on them it's useful to work on the uncompressed version rather than the compressed version. Otherwise you get a lot of unnecessary differences between the old and the new version. Small changes cascade into big changes in the compressed package.

And, in answer to your final question, I have no idea why people aren't doing either of the above. The deltarpm stuff which just went into Fedora is still operating on the compressed packages without bothering to optimise it, as far as I know.

It seems like people just don't care that much about how efficient the update process is, at least for Linux distributions. Why else would we still be using yum?