Daniel Kahn Gillmor writes: > The Packages file is growing, and we would like to keep it smaller. > > The MD5sum lines are vestigial at this point. Anything that they do > can be done better with the data from the SHA256sum lines.
I agree it would be nice to remove MD5sum from Packages; there are a few other fields that might also not be that useful (e.g. Maintainer). > #887831 suggests that jigdo may currently still be broken if MD5sum > goes away, but perhaps that's more of a reflection on the unmaintained > state of jigdo than it is on the state of the archive. >From looking, I believe it is debian-cd's tools/grab_md5 that is using the MD5sum from Packages (and Sources) to avoid having to compute all these checksums itself. We could look into either - writing MD5sum in a separate file only used by debian-cd (if present, otherwise debian-cd should fall back to using Packages), or - using a (truncated) sha256sum; this requires that the jigdo client only uses the "md5sum" as an opaque identifier for a file. I've CC'ed debian-cd@ for input. Ansgar
