Re: apt-diff: a tool to diff filesystem content against APT
On 07/12/10 at 17:45 -0800, Tristan Schmelcher wrote:
> (I'm not subscribed to this list, please CC me on replies.)
>
> I have recently written a tool I call "apt-diff" to compare filesystem
> content against APT. It is intended for investigating problems where
> packaged files get modified/deleted after installing them from APT
> (e.g., by user customization, accidental deletion, etc.). I originally
> wrote it after clobbering the packaged ALSA installation on my
> computer with "make install" and needing a good way to detect which
> packaged files had been modified so that I could restore them. I also
> find it useful for figuring out what customizations I have made to my
> system after I have forgotten about them.
>
> Conceptually apt-diff is meant to act like "svn diff", "git diff",
> etc., except that instead of comparing to a source code repository it
> compares to the APT repositories. I've designed it for processing many
> files/packages in batch, so diff'ing the entire filesystem is doable.
> It's sort of like an APT-aware version of debsums. The code is at
> https://github.com/TristanSchmelcher/apt-diff
>
> My hope is for this to become part of the APT stack in Debian and I'm
> posting here to see if there is any interest in that from the Debian
> developer community. I think it might be helpful for it to be invoked
> from reportbug to diagnose/triage issues where files or configurations
> have been changed. Plus I think it's just a nice tool to have
> available for power users.
Hi,
How does it compare to the cruft package?
- Lucas
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