Re: Debdiff project announcement.

[Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>]

Tom Rothamel wrote:
> Information on the order of elements within control.tar and data.tar
> will be preserved in the debdiff. This should lead to identical output
> to the original when these files are compressed with gzip.

It won't, because .gz files have timestamps in them that change when they
are repacked. Try and see..

joey@paper:/tmp>touch foo
joey@paper:/tmp>gzip foo
joey@paper:/tmp>mv foo.gz foo.old.gz
joey@paper:/tmp>touch foo
joey@paper:/tmp>gzip foo
joey@paper:/tmp>cmp foo.gz foo.old.gz 
foo.gz foo.old.gz differ: char 5, line 1
joey@paper:/tmp>less foo.gz 
"foo.gz" may be a binary file.  See it anyway? 
^_<8#L<9C>8^@^Cfoo^@^C^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@
joey@paper:/tmp>less foo.old.gz 
"foo.old.gz" may be a binary file.  See it anyway? 
^_<8ESCL<9C>8^@^Cfoo^@^C^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@

I thought either xdelta or rdist had .deb file support already, and could
pull apart the compressed archives so the method it used to generate diffs
worked on non-compressed data and generated small diffs. If so, that is
really all you need to use.

-- 
see shy jo, dpkg-repack author