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Table of Contents What is pkgdiff? Downloads License Supported Platforms System Requirements Installation Usage Adv. Usage Examples Bugs Maintainers

What is pkgdiff?

Package Changes Analyzer (pkgdiff) is a tool for analyzing changes in Linux software packages (RPM, DEB, TAR.GZ, etc). The tool is intended for Linux maintainers who are interested in ensuring compatibility of old and new versions of packages.

Downloads

All releases can be downloaded from this page.

Read-only access to the latest development version:

    git clone https://github.com/lvc/pkgdiff.git

License

This program is free software. You may use, redistribute and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU GPL

Supported Platforms

GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X

System Requirements

• Perl 5 (5.8 or newer)
• GNU Diff
• GNU Wdiff
• GNU Awk
• GNU Binutils (readelf)
• RPM (rpm2cpio, rpm) for analysis of RPM packages
• DPKG (dpkg-deb, dpkg) for analysis of DEB packages

Suggests:

• ABI Compliance Checker (1.96.7 or newer)

Installation

The tool is ready-to-use after extracting the archive.

You can also use a Makefile to install the tool into the system:

  sudo make install prefix=PREFIX [/usr, /usr/local]

This command will install a pkgdiff program to the PREFIX/bin system directory and private modules into the PREFIX/share.

Usage

  pkgdiff PKG1 PKG2

The HTML report will be generated to:

  pkgdiff_reports/<pkg>/<v1>_to_<v2>/changes_report.html

Adv. Usage

For advanced usage, see output of --help option:

  pkgdiff --help

If you need to analyse a group of packages then you can create an XML-descriptor of this group (OLD.xml file):

  <group>
      libglib
  </group>
  
  <packages>
      libglib2.0-devel-2.24.1-1mdv2010.1.i586.rpm
      libglib2.0_0-2.24.1-1mdv2010.1.i586.rpm
  </packages>

And then pass XML-descriptors of old and new versions of a group to the tool:

  pkgdiff -old OLD.xml -new NEW.xml

The HTML report will be generated to:

  pkgdiff_reports/<group>/<v1>_to_<v2>/changes_report.html

Examples

Compare 0.4.1 and 0.8.1 versions of libqb SRPM-packages:

  pkgdiff -old libqb-0.4.1-2.fc15.src.rpm -new libqb-0.8.1-2.fc16.src.rpm  

The HTML report will be generated to: pkgdiff_reports/libqb/0.4.1-2.fc15_to_0.8.1-2.fc16/changes_report.html

Compare 0.10.23 and 0.10.32 versions of gstreamer TXZ-packages:

  pkgdiff -old gstreamer-0.10.23-i486-1.txz -new gstreamer-0.10.32-i486-1.txz

The HTML report will be generated to: pkgdiff_reports/gstreamer/0.10.23-i486-1_to_0.10.32-i486-1/changes_report.html

Bugs

Please post your bug reports, feature requests and questions to the issue tracker.

Maintainers

The tool is developed by Andrey Ponomarenko.