Re: changes file format

[Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk>]

James A. Robinson writes ("Re: changes file format "):
> >847dfb732aa3e994f1917d27ffc20eb3  adduser-1.94-2.deb
> >70fa124c71e5b709019f6729eb8cfe11  adduser-1.94-2.tar.gz
> >-rw-r--r--   1 root     root        13122 Oct 23 18:43 adduser-1.94-2.deb
> >-rw-rw-r--   1 root     ian         24448 Oct 23 18:43 adduser-1.94-2.tar.gz
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^          ^^^^^^^^^^^^
> File permissions, link count, ownership an modification times on the
> maintainer's system are not of general interest, why include them in an
> announcement? The rest easily fits onto a single line and put the fixed length
> parts in front.

I agree that this is a kludge, and I would write a separate script to
produce a less overblown output form.  However ....

> # md5sum                              size  name
> 70fa124c71e5b709019f6729eb8cfe11     24448  adduser-1.94-2.tar.gz
> 847dfb732aa3e994f1917d27ffc20eb3     13122  adduser-1.94-2.deb   
> 
> With fixed length fields the dchanges format will yield a nice readable table
> and a trivial pipe (left as an exercise to the reader) lets you check the
> md5sum.

.... this is not good enough.

Remember, our release announcements are intended for general
consumption and use perhaps even on MSDOS systems, where `a trivial
pipe' is a major undertaking.

We need to be able to feed the announcement to `md5sum -c', which
expects <checksum> <space> <space> <filename>.

Ian.