Package Changes Analyzer (pkgdiff)
01 февраля 2012 | Irina Monakhova | Products
ROSA introduces “Package Changes Analyzer” (pkgdiff) - a new package changes analysis and visualization tool intended for any Linux maintainers.
Package maintainers of Linux distributions are often faced with the task of evaluating the differences between old and new versions of the program. For example, to analyze the impact of distribution transition to the new version - depending on the nature of change, this transition can go unnoticed by other packages and may also require rebuilding and adaptation of many dependent programs.
“Package Changes Analyzer”(pkgdiff) is designed to automate this task. It defines the differences between two packages, comparing their structure and content–RPM/Deb tags, file lists, and more. For each file present in both old and new package, it conducts additional analysis of changes, according to the file type. For shared libraries, it analyzes the changes in provided interfaces, for help files–displays the content differences, and so on. Currently, such checks are not performed for all the file types, though the coverage will be expanded in future versions of the tool. It is also planned to estimate the impact of changes in the package to the dependent packages in the repository.
The output of the tool is a HTML-report with detailed changes for each package file. Examples:
http://pkgdiff.github.com/pkgdiff/pkgdiff_reports/libqb/0.4.1_to_0.8.1/compat_report.html;
Unlike analogues (Debdiff, Urpmdiff), “Pkgdiff” can work with prebuilt RPM/Deb – packages, and with common archives. The tool is distributed under the GPL license and is available for download from this site: http://pkgdiff.github.com/pkgdiff/ .
