Fedora Updates: whole packages vs patches

[Rich Burroughs]

Jorge Fábregas wrote:

> 1- create an rpm with just that file (thus...it will be a patch rpm). size 1K

Then the md5sums that RPM uses to check the integrity of the files would 
be broken for the initial package. It's not perfect, but rpm -V is a 
nice quick and dirty way to check if files have been altered or trojaned.

In the case of a patch RPM like you mention, you'd then have to also 
check the sums for the patch, and compare that to the list of files in 
the original, to make sure that the ones in the original package that 
had been changed were all the same files in the patch. It would be 
pretty messy.


Rich