On Thu, 6 Apr 2000, Nick Cabatoff wrote: > I hacked dpkg-scanpackages the next day to do this, and then realized > it was pointless. The md5sums are what take by far the most time. > For a while I decided that was okay and just looked at file The FTP archive actually uses a special version of dpkg-scanpackages that cooperates with dsync to cache MD5s. Performance is dominated by the time it takes to unpack the control tar. Jason