Re: Is there a chance for teTeX-3.0 in sarge?

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

(By the way, Henning, are you subscribed to debian-tetex-maint, or
should I keep Cc'ing you?)

Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net> wrote:

> Unpack the data.tar.gz component of all .debs in temporary directories
> and compare their contents. If there are byte differences between (a)
> and (b) that are not close to byte differences between (b) and (c),
> then flag the package for manual attention.

How can I make this comparison?  I thought that cmp(1) would be useful
here, but it doesn't seem to be.  It really does a byte-by-byte
comparison: If there is one additional byte somewhere, everything after
it will be reported as differing. 

,---- info diff
|    To illustrate the effect that considering changes character by
| character can have compared with considering them line by line, think
| of what happens if a single newline character is added to the beginning
| of a file.  If that file is then compared with an otherwise identical
| file that lacks the newline at the beginning, `diff' will report that a
| blank line has been added to the file, while `cmp' will report that
| almost every character of the two files differs.
`----

Did you have any other tool in mind?  Or do you think simply comparing
sizes should be enough?

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer