I recently encountered a bug in one of the Linux utilities I was using, and upgrading to the latest version of the utility appeared to fix the issue. Being the curious guy I am, I started poking around the web and various release notes to see when the issue was fixed. While digging through this information, I came across the SUPER handy yum changelog plugin. This nifty plugin will display the changes that have occurred to a package, along with the version those changes were incorporated into. To use the changelog plugin, you first need to install it:
$ yum install yum-changelog
After the plugin is installed, you can add the “–changelog” argument to the yum command line to view the changelog for that package:
$ yum update kernel --changelog
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Loading "changelog" plugin
Setting up Update Process
Setting up repositories
other.xml.gz 100% |=========================| 1.1 MB 00:08
##################################################
361/361
other.xml.gz 100% |=========================| 5.3 MB 00:42
##################################################
462/462
other.xml.gz 100% |=========================| 7.1 MB 00:15
##################################################
2400/2400
other.xml.gz 100% |=========================| 145 B 00:00
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Resolving Dependencies
--> Populating transaction set with selected packages. Please wait.
---> Downloading header for kernel to pack into transaction set.
kernel-2.6.18-53.1.14.el5 100% |=========================| 258 kB
00:00
---> Package kernel.i686 0:2.6.18-53.1.14.el5 set to be installed
--> Running transaction check
Changes in packages about to be updated:
kernel - 2.6.18-53.1.14.el5.i686
Wed Mar 5 17:00:00 2008 Karanbir Singh <kbsingh@centos.org>
- Change gpg key to CentOS
Tue Feb 19 17:00:00 2008 Anton Arapov <aarapov@redhat.com>
[2.6.18-53.1.14.el5]
- merge from 2.6.18-53.1.13 to 2.6.18-53.1.12
- [nfs] potential file corruption issue when writing (Jeff Layton )
[432078]
- [ppc] chrp: fix possible strncmp NULL pointer usage (Vitaly
Mayatskikh ) [396821]
- [isdn] i4l: fix memory overruns (Vitaly Mayatskikh ) [425171]
- [isdn] fix possible isdn_net buffer overflows (Aristeu Rozanski )
[392151] {CVE-2007-6063}
- [mm] hugepages: leak due to pagetable page sharing (Larry Woodman )
[431522]
- [net] NULL dereference in iwl driver (Vitaly Mayatskikh ) [401421]
{CVE-2007-5938}
- [misc] Denial of service with wedged processes (Jerome Marchand )
[221403]
- [xen] ia64: hvm guest memory range checking (Jarod Wilson ) [408701]
....
This is an incredibly useful feature, especially if you are trying to track down when a specific bug was fixed by a given Linux distribution. Rock on!