RPM: how to find installed differences?

[Gerry Reno]

Denis Leroy wrote:
> Bruno Wolff III wrote:
>> 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.
>
> 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
I'll try this, but I think it will always give the same result for both 
since its working from metadata and that won't change.

>
> 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
>
Looks interesting.  I need to try this command.

Regards,
Gerry