this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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That's how patches used to be 😆
Patches today patch source code. The kind of binary patching you talk about only works with deterministic builds, which sadly there's not enough of out there.
Lemme just say I'm old
I don't see how that's related at all. Having deterministic builds only matters if you're building a binary from source, if you're working with some distributed binary you'll be applying the patch to identical binaries anyway. And if a new binary is distributed, that's going to be because something in the source was changed; deterministic builds will still give you a different binary if the source changes.
Binary patching is still common, both for getting around DRM and for software updates.