Re: Processed: reassign 341839 to tech-ctte

[Ian Jackson <ian@davenant.greenend.org.uk>]

Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org>
> It's that way in sarge also. I'm frankly going to ignore this unless the
> tech ctte revisits it.

Please read the committee decision on the matter at
 http://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2004/06/msg00032.html

In particular:

 9. [...]   Our conclusions apply to the utility md5sum no matter
    which version is chosen and no matter which package it is in.

Is there a patch available for coreutils ?  I was going to produce one
but I got distracted.

>   AFAICT this was dealt with in the tech ctte because
> it was a pet peeve of ian jackson. 

Firstly, there were two bug submitters involved; one from me and one
from Eduard Bloch.  Secondly, the TC dealt with it because I referred
it there, yes; but the TC will deal (only) with any matter that
someone brings to our attention.

>  I find it vaguely disturbing that there was an entire thread about
> changing the behavior of a program in coreutils that *was never
> mentioned to the coreutils maintainer*. Since nobody told me about
> this discussion, I'll assume I was meant to ignore it. FWIW, both
> md5sums in sarge shipped with the "forbidden" behavior and I see no
> compelling reason whatsoever to deviate from either our own current
> output or every other distribution's (which is based on coreutils'
> upstream behavior).

Please read the TC decision, and the preceding discussion on the TC
list.

Thanks,
Ian.