Re: Debdiff project announcement.
On Sat, Feb 05, 2000 at 11:17:16AM -0500, Joey Hess wrote:
> Tom Rothamel wrote:
> > Information on the order of elements within control.tar and data.tar
> > will be preserved in the debdiff. This should lead to identical output
> > to the original when these files are compressed with gzip.
>
> It won't, because .gz files have timestamps in them that change when they
> are repacked. Try and see..
Grr... you're right, of course. I'll need to figure out a way around
this one. (Probably originally by coming out with a tool that can
checksum the individual members of a deb, ignoring differences in the
gzip compression.)
> I thought either xdelta or rdist had .deb file support already, and could
> pull apart the compressed archives so the method it used to generate diffs
> worked on non-compressed data and generated small diffs. If so, that is
> really all you need to use.
Well, xdelta has some support for gzipped files. However, debdiff
will be more specific to debian packages, making it easier to
(eventually) come up with a (member-checksum) identical package even
when repacking from an unpacked archive. (For example, debdiff is
planned to store config files intact in it's output. This would allow
an identical deb to be produced even when config files are changed.)
--
Tom Rothamel --------- http://onegeek.org/~tom/ ---------- Using GNU/Linux
"Students who successfully accomplish this task will be given
extra credit (and a complete psychiatric examination)."
- Andrew S. Tannenbaum, _Structured Computer Organization_
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