Re: debsums for maintainer scripts (was: Re: Revival of the signed debs discussion)

[Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net>]

Scripsit Mark Carroll <mark@chaos.x-philes.com>

> I use debsums to help me decide what I need to back up - if a
> file's shipped with a package and hasn't been modified, I don't back up
> the file, because I already back up the fact that that package was
> installed.

If you have locally modified a file shipped with a package that isn't
a conffile (in which case it *has* an md5sum), then either you or the
package maintainer is doing something seriously wrong. Get a clue or
file a bug report, as appropriate.

(The cases where a bug in the package means that it *is* appropriate
to modify a non-conffile ought to be rare enough that it is not a big
task to keep a list of backing-up exceptions up-to-date by hand.)

-- 
Henning Makholm                    "What the hedgehog sang is not evidence."