The tool is packaged in Debian. You can install it with the following command.
apt-get install coinst
Alternatively, the source code for this tool is available on Github. In order to compile it, you need the OCaml compiler, and the Findlib and Cudf libraries. Then, you can just type "make" to start the compilation.
The binary is called coinst-upgrades
.
First, you need to download the Debian control files of the pair of distributions you want to consider. The following commands download the control files for Debian testing respectively on Dec 20, 2011 and Jan 01, 2012.
wget http://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20111220/dists/testing/main/binary-i386/Packages.bz2 -O 2011-12-20.bz2 wget http://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20120120/dists/testing/main/binary-i386/Packages.bz2 -O 2012-01-20.bz2
Then, you can run the tool on this pair of files to get a collection of upgrade issues.
The output can be viewed with a Web browser.coinst-upgrades -o issues.html 2011-12-20.bz2 2012-01-20.bz2
firefox issues.html
You can view a daily
report of issues, generated by coinst-upgrades
and
the related
tool comigrate
.
Issues introduced between pairs of Debian testing snapshots, one month apart:
Issues introduced between major Debian releases:
squeeze
and wheezy
. We have found a number of bugs
that we
have reported in the Debian bug tracking system.