Re: md5sums files

[Agustin Martin <agmartin@debian.org>]

On Mon, Mar 08, 2010 at 10:47:18AM +0100, Agustin Martin wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 05, 2010 at 02:07:01PM -0600, Peter Samuelson wrote:
> > 
> > [Russ Allbery]
> > > Figuring out a better solution for why the files in /var/lib/ispell
> > > and /var/lib/aspell are excluded from the md5sums generation because
> > > they change after installation is probably needed if we're going to
> > > remove creation of those files from control of the packager.
> > 
> > It seems odd to ship files that are expected to change, but aren't
> > conffiles.  What happens if you either reinstall or upgrade the deb in
> > question?  I mean, the local changes get overwritten - how is that not
> > a bad thing?
> 
> That file is rewritten, a script run from dictionary postinst detects that
> it is rewritten (really that version in it is nil or lower that current
> compatibility version for the spellchecking engine) and rebuilds the
> dictionary hash according to data provided by the new dictionary.

Forgot to mention that those files contain no /etc like local changes. There
are two types of files there, compat (or status) files and dictionary
hashes.

compat file is a file that is initially empty and that after a dictionary
hash is created will contain the compatibility version used for its
creation. This is not to be modified my sysadmin and has nothing to do with
usual local changes at /etc. That compatibility version is used to check,
when ispell or aspell are upgraded, if dictionary hash needs to be rebuilt.

The other type of file are dictionary hashes, created on-the-fly. They depend
on the data provided by the dictionary, on system endianess and on the
compatibility version of the spellchecking engine, and need to be rebuilt 
if this last changes (really if changes to an non compatible format).

-- 
Agustin