Re: md5sum proposal

[Piotr Roszatycki <dexter@fnet.pl>]

Ok,
I checked current situation and looked in to rpm.

dexter@cyan$ pwd
/pub/debian/dists/potato
dexter@cyan$ for i in */binary-i386/*/*.deb; do echo $i; done | wc -l \
> 2>/dev/null
   3282
dexter@cyan$ for i in */binary-i386/*/*.deb; do dpkg-deb -I $i|grep md5sums \
> 2>/dev/null; done | wc -l
   2284                                                                         

2284 / 3282 = 69.59 %

70% of Debian packages use md5sums file.

What about RPM?

URL:http://www.rpm.org/support/RPM-HOWTO-5.html

Let's say you delete some files by accident, but you aren't sure what you 
deleted. If you want to verify your entire system and see what might be 
missing, you would do: 

    rpm -Va

man rpm

[...]
       Verifying  a  package  compares  information   about   the
       installed  files in the package with information about the
       files taken from the original package and  stored  in  the
       rpm  database.  Among other things, verifying compares the
       size, MD5 sum, permissions, type, owner and group of  each
       file.  Any discrepencies are displayed.  The package spec­
       ification options are the same as for package querying.
[...]
       The following characters
       denote failure of certain tests:    

       5      MD5 sum
       S      File size
       L      Symlink
       T      Mtime
       D      Device
       U      User
       G      Group
       M      Mode (includes permissions and file type)                         

IMHO we should decide if 100% or 0% of Debian packages would use this
package verification. Somebody wrote: a half baken solution can be worse 
then no solution at all. The current situation is very unclear.

-- 

Piotr "Dexter" Roszatycki
mailto:dexter@fnet.pl