Re: md5sums files

[Michael Banck <mbanck@debian.org>]

On Fri, Mar 05, 2010 at 07:54:29PM +0100, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
> Bernd Zeimetz <bernd@bzed.de> writes:
> > I think its about time to require to generate checksums for packages and make
> > all packages which do not do so RC buggy.
> 
> If a checksum file becomes required then it really is not the job of the
> package to build it. Instead dpkg should generate one and include it
> automatically. 

Following that logic, dpkg should do everything anyway (like rpm), no
need for debhelper, dh, or anything.

I don't think that just because something is required, it should be
necessarily part of dpkg.  So far, we are talking about a policy of
including md5sum in our .debs, *not* about changing the .deb format to
require md5sums (at least, as far as I can tell).

Once the former works out fine for squeeze, we can still think about
doing the latter by modifying dpkg-builddeb or something, but I think
this is premature at this point (in the release cycle).


Michael