NAME
debdelta - compute changes between Debian packages
SYNOPSIS
debdelta [OPTION]... FROMFILE TOFILE DELTA
DESCRIPTION
This program computes changes between Debian packages FROMFILE and
TOFILE. These changes are stored in the file DELTA. The DELTA file may
later be used by the "debpatch" program to recreate TOFILE from
FROMFILE. In a sense, the pair of programs "debdelta"/"debpatch"
operate on Debian packages similar to how the pair "diff"/"patch"
operate on text files; indeed, the output of "debdelta" may be used to
store and transmit only the changes between Debian packages; but,
contrary to the "diff" output, the output of "debdelta" is not human
readable, but rather it is intended to be as small as possible (to
optimize for less disk usage and/or faster transmission).
OPTIONS
--signing-key KEY
key used to sign the delta (using GnuPG).
--no-md5
do not include MD5 info in delta.
--needsold
create a patch that can only be used if the old .deb is
available.
--delta-algo ALGO
use a specific backend for computing binary diffs; possible
values are: xdelta xdelta-bzip xdelta3 bsdiff
-M Mb maximum memory to use (for ’bsdiff’ or ’xdelta’).
-v verbose (can be added multiple times).
-d print full traceback on Python errors; save useful info in
temporary files in case that a backend crashes.
(If ’-d’ is added multiple times, it also adds to the patches
other extra debugging checks: only for advanced bug tracking).
-k keep temporary files (use for debugging).
--gpg-home
specify a different home for GnuPG, default for root is
/etc/debdelta/gnupg while for other users is unset. See
--homedir in gpg(1) for details.
--disable-feature FEATURE
disable an internal feature. See the documentation in
README.features.
EXAMPLE
The command
debdelta libglib_2.12_all.deb libglib_2.14_all.deb /tmp/glib.debdelta
will express the difference between two versions of libglib in
/tmp/glib.debdelta ; the command
debpatch -A /tmp/glib.debdelta libglib_2.12_all.deb /tmp/glib.deb
will create in /tmp/glib.deb a perfect copy of libglib_2.14_all.deb.
SECURITY
A Debian package that is recreated using debpatch is byte-by-byte
identical to the original one; so the cryptographic archive
authentication support for APT (see apt-secure(8) ) may be used to
assert that it can be trusted to be installed. Moreover, if a GnuPG
key is specified using --signing-key then the delta file itself is
cryptograhically protected using GnuPG, MD5 and SHA1 (using the same
method as dpkg-sig(1) ). Note that, for non-root users, the master
debdelta keyring /usr/share/keyrings/debian-debdelta-archive-
keyring.gpg is added to the list of keyrings for gnupg.
EXIT STATUS
0 if OK,
1 if there was a retriable problem (e.g., out-of-disk-space, or an
auxiliary program such ’lzma’ is missing and the user is asked
to install the package ’lzma’),
2 if there was a non-retriable problem,
3 if there was an error in a command-line option, or in a
configuration file,
4 if there is an internal error, and
5 if exited due to keyboard interrupt.
REPORTING BUGS
Report bugs to <mennucc1@debian.org>.
AUTHORS
Debdelta was written and is copyright © 2006-09 Andrea Mennucci.
This man page was written by Jegou Pierre-yves
<pierreyves.jeg@voila.fr>.
COPYING
This is free software. You may redistribute copies of it under the
terms of the GNU Library General Public License
<http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-2.0.html>. There is NO WARRANTY, to
the extent permitted by law.
SEE ALSO
debdelta-upgrade(1), debpatch(1), debdeltas(1),
/usr/share/doc/debdelta/README.