James A. Robinson writes ("Re: changes file format "):
> >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.
I agree that this is a kludge, and I would write a separate script to
produce a less overblown output form. However ....
> # 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.
.... this is not good enough.
Remember, our release announcements are intended for general
consumption and use perhaps even on MSDOS systems, where `a trivial
pipe' is a major undertaking.
We need to be able to feed the announcement to `md5sum -c', which
expects <checksum> <space> <space> <filename>.
Ian.
