Re: apt-diff: a tool to diff filesystem content against APT
On Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 11:30 PM, Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de> wrote:
> Tristan Schmelcher <tristan.schmelcher@gmail.com> writes:
>
>>> how does it deal with configurations generated in postinstall?
>>
>> Only files shipped by a package (i.e., appear in its .list file) can be
>> diff'ed, so if a configuration file was generated from scratch in a
>> postinst then apt-diff can't show a diff for it. But it does keep track
>> of how many files it has seen that aren't owned by any package, and
>> there is an option to print the list, so you can use that to see what
>> generated files are present in a directory tree. But at that point you
>> sort of have to know what you're looking for.
>>
>> Sort of analogous to an untracked file in a VCS system.
>
> Isn't debsums already filling that nieche?
>
> MfG
> Goswin
>
I find debsums to be too basic for my needs. apt-diff is my attempt to
improve upon it. I often want to answer the question "how does package
X on my machine compare to a pristine installation?" debsums only
gives part of the answer. It can't check files that are missing
md5sums (which includes a lot of conffiles) and when it finds a
discrepancy I still need to manually download the package and diff the
files myself. apt-diff solves both problems. It also allows for
checking by path instead of by package, which is useful when I want to
check a whole directory tree that contains files from many packages.
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