RPM: how to find installed differences?

[Denis Leroy]

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

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