Bruno Wolff III wrote:
On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 13:22:02 -0500, Gerry Reno greno@verizon.net wrote:
Well, what I was hoping was that there was a tool that could install the original RPM into a sandbox and then compare the differences between the sandbox install and the existing installation and report the differences. The problem that I'm trying to solve is inevitably we make changes to installations due to many reasons; bug fixes, config changes, security patches, etc. Then when we want to upgrade to a later version of that installation we don't always know exactly what has been changed in the installation since we first installed it. I looking for a way to see all changes in the installation, whether to original files or newly added files, as compared to the original RPM.
You may simply want to write a script to do this comparison, or dump the contents of those 2 commands :
# rpm -ql yourpackage > file1 # rpm -ql yourpackage.xxx.rpm > file2
and compare the 2 outputs with a tool like 'meld' or with emacs
If you want to install an RPM file into a sandbox, that's easily done with :
# rpm2cpio foo.rpm | cpio -id