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. > > > >