Re: [gentoo-user] Compare two Gentoo machines - please help

[Helmut Jarausch <jarausch@igpm.rwth-aachen.de>]

Thanks to all of you who have tried to help me.

As it turned out, comparing MD5 sum is intractable,
/usr/lib64 alone contained more than 500,000 files !

The /etc tree didn't show significant differences.

So, I resorted to keep my 4 cores busy over the weekend to
re-emerge the whole machine.

That's the price for a highly configurable and up-to-date system like 
Gentoo - but I like it. But it's the first time I needed to do it since
several years, now.

Helmut.

On 05/17/2011 10:21:16 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote:
> On Tuesday 17 May 2011 17:57:42 Blakawk wrote:
> 
> >  As far as i remember, i don't see why modification times will 
> enter
> in
> >  the md5sum computation process, as they are not part of the file
> but of
> >  the filesystem's inode... it's definitely possible to compare two
> >  binaries on two different system if they are compiled with the 
> same
> >  compiler version and libraries 
> 
> in theory. In practice only a slight change here and there - might
> result in 
> huge changes. 'Almost identical' but the things that are not 
> identical
> will 
> screw you up. Almost identical is like 'totally different' in this
> case.
> 
> Instead wasting time comparing the machines, he should find the
> culprit for 
> the segfault. KDE's backtracking tool (drkonqi) and strace help a lot
> with 
> that. If he knows where it fails, he at least has a chance to find 
> out
> why.
> 
> 
> 
>