Put a fixed md5sum into sarge-updates?

[Matthew Vernon <matthew@sel.cam.ac.uk>]

Hi,

I've been preparing to upgrade some woody systems to sarge, and 
colleagues have pointed out to me that the syntax that md5sum outputs 
has changed. This will break my backup and mirroring arrangements. 
Looking in the BTS, I see bugs 164591 and 164889; md5sum has been fixed 
(at least in experimental) to revert to the older behaviour, in line 
with a decision by the technical committee.

Can I make a case for this fix going into sarge-updates, please, on
two grounds:

i) This is a bug that will break the woody->sarge transition on at 
least some systems
ii) The erroneous behaviour will be reverted again in future, so 
causing a similar problem for people who develop code relying on the 
incorrect behaviour

The Technical committee decision is at
http://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2004/06/msg00032.html
Point 6 seems especially relevant, so I take the liberty of quoting
it:
"6. Regarding the compatibility risks of changing the behaviour, we
    note that:
    i.   The behaviour of Debian's md5sum has varied, changing several
         times between the bare and the annotated format.
    ii.  Different implementations of md5sum have different output
         formats, so that the most widespread behaviour has not been
         consistent either.
    iii. It seems unlikely to us that there are significant numbers of
         programs which depend on the annotated format."

If the maintainers are too busy, maybe I could ask the submitter of one 
of the original bugs to NMU to sarge-proposed-updates?

Regards,

Matthew

--
Matthew Vernon MA VetMB LGSM MRCVS
Farm Animal Epidemiology and Informatics Unit
Department of Veterinary Medicine, University of Cambridge
http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~mcv21/