Hi, The test package provided elsewhere in this bug may have an invalid md5sums file. As detailed in commit 822d4b70, the specifications explain that newlines are escaped with a backslash but are printed *verbatim*:
https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/md5sum-invocation.html That is also how the md5sum tool behaves. It can be tested on any file system. The test package, however, ships an md5sums file in a different format. That file, which is reproduced in full below, renders the newline as 'n', a customary control character. That is incorrect and defective. It should have an actual newline character with the value 0x0a: e367e202f03b5f62800ece455a165565 usr/share/doc/newline/changelog.gz \d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e usr/share/newline/\n/etc/issue This detail was probably not noticed when the bug was closed because Lintian dequoted file names in various places. When all file indices were made true, Lintian produced this output: $ frontend/lintian ../bugs/newline/newline_1_all.deb E: newline: extended-description-is-empty E: newline: md5sums-lists-nonexistent-file usr/share/newline/n/etc/issue E: newline: no-copyright-file W: newline: file-missing-in-md5sums usr/share/newline/\n/etc/issue As one can see, the files names did not match. Lintian replaces all newlines with \n when printing tags. The fact that they look the same is the give-away. The package newline.deb is exotic, and current tools may refuse to produce it. Unfortunately, it also contains an invalid list of md5sums. Kind regards Felix Lechner