RPM: how to find installed differences?

Bruno Wolff III bruno at wolff.to
Sat Jan 24 18:29:32 UTC 2009


On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 13:22:02 -0500,
  Gerry Reno <greno at 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.

How is rpm supposed to know that some new file is considered by you to be
owned by it?

What you could do is use rpm to see what package provides a file that you
want to check and if none does, than it would be a new file (or in a few
cases one created by an install script).




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