Re: rpmorig/rpmnew

[Justin Georgeson <jgeorgeson lopht net>]

Jeff Johnson wrote:
> On Tue, May 27, 2003 at 05:40:02PM -0500, Justin Georgeson wrote:
>
> > I'm curious about how RPM determines when to write an rpmorig or rpmnew 
> > file. I recently upgraded from Psyche to shrike (using apt from 
> > freshrpms) and was left with a bunch of rpmorig and rpmnew files. What I 
> > found irritating about it was that the vast majority of them were 
> > identical to the existing files in question. Wouldn't it make sense to 
> > not create these files when there's no change?
>
>
> The .rpmorig suffix is added if a file to be installed that is marked
> with "%config" is found on the file system but is not "owned" by any package.
> Basically the original file "foo" is renamed to "foo.rpmorig".

Hm, maybe I didn't pay enough attention to the set of packages. It seems 
odd to me that doing an upgrade would install so many new packages. It's 
also odd that I had so many unowned config files. I would have thought 
they would be saved as rpmsave files when I uninstalled the package. (I 
tend to keep away from installing from source or precompiled binaries 
and such)

> The .rpmnew suffix is added if a file to be installed is marked with
> "%config(noreplace)" and the local file is modified wrto the original
> md5sum. Basically the incoming file is installed as "foo.rpmnew" rather
> than "foo".
>
> There's also the .rpmsave suffix, added to the original file file if
> modified, owned by package, and marked "%config". Basically, the
> local mods to a package file "foo" are saved in "foo.rpmsave".

That one makes sense to me.

> All but .rpmorig about involve explcict detection of local modifications.
> There's no way (in general) to detect modifications to an unowned
> file because there is no unambiguous reference point to identify "modified".
> The file is renamed just in case.

Seems logical.

> Note that more than md5sum is involved, there's also mtime, user, group,
> perms, and other stat(2) info that is involved in detecting "modified".

Well that would explain a lot. All I did was compare file size and contents.

Thanks.