[Python] How can you verify two tar.gz files are identical

I am making a sharing protocol, and when you share a folder it gets tar.gz-ipped and inserted in a folder.

It's created like this:

with tarfile.open(full_data_name, "w:gz", format=GNU_FORMAT) as tar_handle:
...
tar_handle.add(file_path)


When you do that again, I'd like to verify and check if new tar.gz is identical to the old one (so I do not need to re-publish it).

I know about pkgdiff and that works fine, but I'd like to do it in python.

I also know I can do it manually, de-zip&tar the files, load up the content and verify byte wise, but isn't there some simpler and less resource hungry method?

I have tried to just check the contents of the tar.gz files (removing the timestamp at byte 4-7) but that only works sometimes, so I guess there is some random reshuffling in the tar part or some randomness in the gz, as pkgdiff says they are the same, but a hex editor shows lots of differences.

Continue reading...