Bug#366780: ITP: summain -- compute and verify file checksums

[Lars Wirzenius <liw@liw.iki.fi>]

to, 2006-05-11 kello 07:13 -0700, Ben Pfaff kirjoitti:
> It's not clear to me, from the description, what the program does
> that the md5sum and sha1sum utilities do not.

It handles .dsc, .changes, and Sources files. But I also forgot to
mention the main reason I wrote it: it gives progress feedback and has
some convenience features.

An updated suggestion for a long description, which also incorporates
Thijs's suggestion to reorder paragraphs:

 summain computes and checks files against such checksums. It supports
 both MD5 and SHA-1 checksums, using formats compatible with the md5sum
 and sha1sum utilities, both for reading and writing. In addition, it
 can read and verify checksums from Debian .dsc, .changes, and Sources
 files.
 .
 Apart from supporting more file formats, summain differs from the
 traditional md5sum and sha1sum utilities by providing progress
 reporting, and via convenience features such as automatic recursion
 into directories, and looking up files relative to the location of the
 checksum file, rather than the current working directory.
 .
 A checksum is a number that identifies the contents of a file: if the
 contents change, so does the checksum. If you create a checksum before
 you burn a CD, when you know the files are correct, you can easily
 check the CD at any time: just compute the checksum again and see if
 they have changed.

I hope this is better.

-- 
RFC 1437 - yet another MIME specification Microsoft ignores