On Thursday 20 Aug 2009 8:05:14 am Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote:
> > This is what making a huge difference, for instance, between
> > applications with open source code and applications shipped in binary
> > form - you can only report bugs, but can't realy make any suggestions
> > about what happening.
>
> All of the tools that created the bits in the first place, as well as
> the tools to change them are inside the same image as the bits. So I
> don't agree with your analogy.
I think a better analogy is the way public key cryptography certificates are 
constituted. What matters is not whether a certificate is encoded in ASCII or 
binary but whether there is a chain of trust. Should anyone lose their 
certificate, it can be reconstituted from its parent cert in the chain. But if 
you happen to lose a root cert then no new chains can be reconstituted. You 
are stuck with the existing chains originating from this root.

The key tools for a 'binary' encoding are the equality and diff tools. Given 
two images A and B, check if they are equivalent. If not, find the difference D 
that will reconstitute B from A.

Subbu