Charles Briscoe-Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Manoj Srivastava) wrote: > > Charles> to check whether you have mistakenly edited an installed script > > which > > Charles> wasn't a conffile, > > > > Ok. But this is not an operation that everyone wants (I > > personally have never needed to do that -- and I can, since I have a > > local mirror, and I can use dpkg --unpac in /tmp and compare > > files). Given that there are old, slow, and low disk space machines > > out there, one should not push all this to every machine out there. > > First, I -did- suggest that it should be optional. > > Second, I've never "needed" to do this either, but if the option was > there, I'd probably use it to verify my system against accidental breakage > every so often.
This is an operation I'd very much like to be able to perform. I share sysadmin on the machines here with people who are not totally indoctrinated in "the Debian way". If something breaks, they're going to fix it however they can; this could include modifying scripts (conffiles or not), overwriting binaries in /usr/bin with freshly-compiled ones (which are not in Debian packages), etc. In fact, I don't think this is really unreasonable; when something breaks, you don't have time to fight with the packaging system to figure out the "right" way to fix it. I try to keep track of this sort of thing, so that these fixes don't get wiped out on upgrades; but I'm never sure if I wrote down even all the stuff I did myself, let alone changes made by other people. This makes upgrades a slightly nerve-wracking procedure. If there were something I could run to see what files from Debian packages no longer match the distributed versions, I would definitely use it on a regular basis. dpkg --unpack and compare doesn't come anywhere close, unless it's highly automated. Even if it is, it still does several times as much disk access as the md5sums approach. I really want md5sums files and something which will run over the system comparing the md5sums file against what's actually there. Note that I have not mentioned malicious crackers--I realize that this provides no protection against minimally knowledgeable crackers. I also have expressed no opinion as to whether the md5sums files should be in the .deb or generated by dpkg; I really don't care. Carl Witty [EMAIL PROTECTED]
