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Re: apt-diff: a tool to diff filesystem content against APT



HI,

On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 12:02:44PM -0800, Tristan Schmelcher wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 11:12 PM, Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de> wrote:
> > Osamu Aoki <osamu@debian.org> writes:
> >
> >> On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 12:06:45AM +0900, Osamu Aoki wrote:
> >>> Hi,
> >>>
> >>> On Wed, Dec 08, 2010 at 12:52:28PM -0800, Tristan Schmelcher wrote:
> >>> > 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?
> >>> > 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)
> >>                                      ~~~~~~~~~
> >>> Wrong.
> >>
> >> OOps..  I now see your point.  Sorry.
> >>
> >>> If you configure debsum correctly following manpage, md5sums are
> >>> available for all packages.  Use -g option to initialize it and make
> >>> sure to set the debconf boolean value debsums/apt-autogen to be "true".
> >>> I understand that this is an exra hussle.
> >>
> >> This is talking about files missing md5sums due to packaging practice of
> >> the maintainer.  conffiles are not debsums interest.
> >
> > Does debsums support ucf? Can it support ucf?

For most package, debsums generated /var/lib/dpkg/info/*md5sums files do
not have files under /etc.  I guess this comes from dh_md5sums default
behavior.

On my system, only following ships such data.
$ cd /var/lib/dpkg/info; grep " etc" *.md5sums |cut -d : -f 1|sort|uniq
bsdmainutils.md5sums
dput.md5sums
initscripts.md5sums
menu.md5sums
ppp.md5sums
runit.md5sums
sysv-rc.md5sums
ucf.md5sums

For me it is more of mistery why these have md5sums files.

bsdmainutils uses denhelper dh_md5sums without -x option.  I do not
understand.

dput does not use debhelper and manually creates it in debian/rules.  I
see why.

...

> > What I mean is that often generated conffiles are installed with ucf and
> > ucf keeps track of the original generated checksum and the possibly
> > localy modified file and such. Does/could debsums tap into that info to
> > find generated conffiles that were changed?
> 
> It would be pretty easy to tap into--the md5sums are all in
> /var/lib/ucf/hashfile and it's already in the format used by md5sum
> -c. But that still leaves a lot to be desired. On my machine there are
> only 26 entries in that file, whereas there are 1663 conffiles without
> md5sums.*

I agree the same observation. See  above on dh_md5sums.

> As far as I know there's no metadata available to check the
> integrity of those files--they have to be compared to the original
> files in the .deb as apt-diff does.

As I read manpage of dh_md5sums, it states:
       -x, --include-conffiles
           Include conffiles in the md5sums list. Note that this
information is redundant since it is included elsewhere in debian
packages.

I have no idea what this is.

Osamu


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