openSUSE has introduced osdiff, a new open-source tool that makes it easier to see how package versions differ between Tumbleweed and Leap without checking them one by one.
The automatically generated page currently tracks 17,780 source packages, including 17,404 in Tumbleweed, 10,605 in Leap 16.1, and 10,600 in Leap 16.0. Of those, 10,314 are present in both Tumbleweed and Leap 16.1.
Packages are grouped into several useful categories. Currently, 4,882 packages are marked Older-in-Leap, meaning Leap 16.1 ships an older upstream version than Tumbleweed, while only 12 are Newer-in-Leap. Another 1,048 use the same version, 7,090 are available only in Tumbleweed, and 376 only in Leap.
The page also introduces a “Perfection” category for packages where Tumbleweed and Leap 16.1 carry the same version, and Repology knows no Linux distribution shipping anything newer. There are 4,372 packages in that group. Repology data also shows 3,464 Tumbleweed packages are behind the newest version it knows.
osdiff pulls package information from openSUSE’s official ARCHIVES.gz repository indexes, covering both oss and non-oss packages for x86_64 and noarch. Upstream version information comes from Repology, while maintainer information is added from PackageHub where available.
One important distinction is that osdiff compares upstream package versions, not RPM release revisions, so two packages shown as having the same version may still differ at the packaging level.
Beyond the searchable and sortable web interface, openSUSE publishes the complete results as JSON, compressed JSON, and CSV files. This makes the data useful for scripts, distribution comparisons, documentation, or checking package changes before moving systems between Leap releases or from Tumbleweed to Leap.
The osdiff project itself is written in Python and is available on GitHub under the openSUSE organization. The public comparison page is automatically regenerated, providing an up-to-date snapshot instead of relying on manually maintained package lists.
For additional details, see the announcement.
