[Reproducible-builds] Bug#820631: Bug#820631: (no subject)

[Reiner Herrmann]

Hi Zbigniew,

thanks for the report!
I just had a short look at this issue.
The problem why diffoscope doesn't see this change is that the initramfs
contains actually multiple cpio archives, but diffoscope treats
the files as single cpio archives:

> $ cpio -t < initrd 
> .
> early_cpio
> kernel
> kernel/x86
> kernel/x86/microcode
> kernel/x86/microcode/GenuineIntel.bin

And the files in this first/visible archive don't differ.

Right now it doesn't know that somewhere in the original file an additional
archive is embedded.
And so it falls back to a hexdump/binary diff, as the files clearly
differ, but it didn't find any more readable difference.

To solve this, diffoscope either needs to learn about initramfs files,
or (to have a more general solution) use binwalk for extracting data
embedded into other files (this would require #819018 first).

Regards,
  Reiner
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