tardiff

About tardiff

From Debian's package description

TarDiff is a simple tool that compares the contents of two tarballs and reports primarily file list differences found between them.

It can also list files which only had modified content, but are present in both tarballs. It though does not show the actually content differences, just which files differ.

Its use is mainly for release managers who can use it as a QA tool to make sure no files have accidentally been left over or were added by mistake. TarDiff supports compressed tarballs, diff statistics and suppression of GNU autotool changes.

For more detailed diffs like e.g. finding different timestamps inside a tar ball or similar minimal changes which still cause differences in hashsums or make a few bytes size difference, please have a look at diffoscope or the diffoscope-minimal package. Diffoscope can also compare many more file types than just tarballs, but also has more hard dependencies and a lot of optional dependencies for specific file formats.

From Debian's description of the tardiff package, under that package's license.