Re: md5sums files

[Peter Samuelson <peter@p12n.org>]

[Wouter Verhelst]
> I must say I was somewhat surprised by these numbers. Out of 2483
> packages installed on my laptop, 2340 install md5sums.

The surprising part, perhaps, is that dpkg itself didn't just generate
the other 143 md5sums files at installation time.

I suggested this a long time ago and of course was met with "so where's
your patch?"  Of course I was not willing to do the work.  But
fundamentally, shipping a md5sums file is really just a tradeoff in
download size vs. installation speed, not unlike gzip vs. bzip2.  One
can imagine in the future, on architectures where CPU is little
consideration, letting those md5sums files all be generated at install
time.

-- 
Peter Samuelson | org-tld!p12n!peter | http://p12n.org/