RPM: how to find installed differences?

[Gerry Reno]

Casey Dahlin wrote:
> Gerry Reno wrote:
>> Bruno Wolff III wrote:
>>> On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 13:01:13 -0500,
>>>   Gerry Reno <greno at verizon.net> wrote:
>>>  
>>>> Does anyone know of a way to find the differences between an  
>>>> installation and its original RPM?
>>>>     
>>>
>>> rpm -V will tell you about installed files that don't match what was in
>>> the rpm. This doesn't handle files created by install scripts, but only
>>> a few things create files in install scripts.
>>>
>>>   
>> Ok, that sort of works to get some information about which files have 
>> some changes.  It doesn't show any new files that may have been added 
>> to the installation though.
>>
> How would it know?
>
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.

Regards,
Gerry