another use of md5sums
On Fri, Dec 19, 1997 at 01:28:52PM -0500, Mark W. Eichin wrote:
> 1) a hardware flake out [computer at a residential site with
>poor environment control, cheap IDE disks -- you know, what most
>developers have, as well as many users] that *seems* to have recovered
>cleanly.
> 2) running a buggy build of e2fs*. [Note that the bugs we've
>had trouble with were all build/package bugs, not original code,
>ie. missing declarations here and there... but we've *had* them.]
there is a third reason as was pointed out in debian-devel
>From: hollen@vigra.com
>Subject: dselect features request
>
>1) Once all packages are selected, be able to dump the selections to
> a file that could be later read in for subsequent identical
> installations.
I basically took that one step further to deal with configuration
files, which is why I was looking into the MD5 sum in the first place,
so I think there are clearly a lot of benefits (some not so evident)
from having the md5sum.
We just have to make sure people don't use them for the wrong thing
by accident, such as security. There are things such as trip-wire for
that, etc...
Radu
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