Hello, A week or two ago I posted some Python code to do binary diffs of Debian packages. I finally got a little more time and made it into a real Debian package itself. I'm not a developer (I keep thinking I should apply but I never feel like I have time..and with new-maintainer evidently overwhelmed it sounds like I'd have to wait for an indefinite amount of time :( ) so if a real developer who's interested in this project could take the package over and make it fully policy-compliant (I'm sure I left something out :/ ) I'd be grateful :) I called the package python-deb, mainly because while it can do binary diffs, the most useful things about it may be that it encapsulates Debian packages in Python objects (see /usr/doc/python-deb/README.Debian for more details) I've attached the source package (the binary package is about the same size), you should be able to extract and build it as usual. For some reason the package isn't building as Debian-native right now -- I spent a bunch of time writing docs and then ran debhelper, I think that dh_make may not handle native packages correctly. So there's a diff and a original source instead of just a tar.gz. Hopefully this can be corrected soon :) The main thing on the TODO list is to try out some ideas that were sent to me which involve diff-ing members of the archive (eg, data.tar.gz) rather than poking inside them. I don't think it'll be sufficient (conffiles are a problem for one thing) but it's appealingly simple in concept and might yield smaller diffs. (I'm not sure :) ) I have a suspicion that it won't work but I'd like to get a prototype to verify this :) Daniel -- If you take the long view, the universe is just something small and round, rather like those snow globes one sees around Christmas time, although unless the ineffable plan is a lot more ineffable than it's given credit for, it doesn't have a little grinning snowman at the bottom. -- Terry Pratchett, _Good Omens_
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