Ian Jackson writes:
>Bill Mitchell writes ("changes file format"):
>> Just out of curiosity, does the following represent a horribly
>> formatted and human-unreadable package announcement? Except for
>> the lack of a Priority field, it passes the dchanges(1) syntax check.
>
>I completely fail to understand why anyone is promoting this format.
>It is ugly,
make it tabular
>and my format is machine readable too.
Given the medium we are using that's a tautology :)
>847dfb732aa3e994f1917d27ffc20eb3 adduser-1.94-2.deb
>70fa124c71e5b709019f6729eb8cfe11 adduser-1.94-2.tar.gz
>-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 13122 Oct 23 18:43 adduser-1.94-2.deb
>-rw-rw-r-- 1 root ian 24448 Oct 23 18:43 adduser-1.94-2.tar.gz
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^
File permissions, link count, ownership an modification times on the
maintainer's system are not of general interest, why include them in an
announcement? The rest easily fits onto a single line and put the fixed length
parts in front.
# md5sum size name
70fa124c71e5b709019f6729eb8cfe11 24448 adduser-1.94-2.tar.gz
847dfb732aa3e994f1917d27ffc20eb3 13122 adduser-1.94-2.deb
With fixed length fields the dchanges format will yield a nice readable table
and a trivial pipe (left as an exercise to the reader) lets you check the
md5sum.
'nuf said
-- Siggy (the middle S.)
