One person is against it; for reasons I have yet to understand, and I'm beginning to have second doubts about it as well (for other reasons).
What I'm thinking is that maybe it should be the responsability of dpkg, since it is the package manager after all. The package itself works as is and there would be not much extra benefit from having the md5sums in the package, though the MD5SUMs should still be there. Maybe they could be calculated at installation time (this would affect performace obviously), but it would be right thing to do. Another alternative is to put a hook in dpkg, so that whenever it installs a package it will execute a hook that the user specifies if he wishes to, with such arguments as the package name, etc... There should probably be two hooks in pace, one before dpkg starts the install and another one for when it finishes. Then the users of dpkg can install any type of hook to do any type of monitoring they need. I think some should be provided, and an option to enable them or disable them should be asked at ground zero of instalation. The default should probably be disabeled. Radu