Ian Jackson writes:
>James A. Robinson writes ("Re: changes file format "):
No, that's me whom you are quoting here>> >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. My dos partition contains a port of gawk, no problem to write the pipe :) In either case it's easier to extract needed parts from a single line than to collect them from several lines. >We need to be able to feed the announcement to `md5sum -c', which >expects <checksum> <space> <space> <filename>. Just curious, does an msdog version of md5sum grog long filenames? Should the 8.3 filename be included in the announcement to suit msdogs? -- Siggy (the middle S.)
