[I CC: this to debian-devel since I think this is of public intrest.
Please send any follow ups _only_ to debian-policy.]
On Mon, 9 Feb 1998, Joey Hess wrote:
> More problems I'm seeing as a view the lintian output -
>
> The lack of an md5sums file is flagged as an error. However, I'm not aware
> of any policy that says we need one. I personally like the md5sums files,
> but I thought lintian was bound by policy, so why is it reporting this as a
> bug?
It's not. Packages which don't have an md5sums control file are ignored by
this Lintian check script.
However, if a package has a md5sums control file, lintian checks whether
this file matches the actual package contents.
For the maintainers with md5sums-bugs: Most problems with md5sums appear
if the debian/tmp directory is touched _after_ debstd (or the
corresponding debhelper script) is run. Furthermore, there was a buggy
debstd which included the DEBIAN/ files in the md5sums files too. In this
case, you rebuild the package with the current deb-make package.
> Also, lintian files it as a bug if a conffile is not listed in the
> md5sums file. Debhelper's dh_md5sums program, which makes md5sum files,
> excludes conffiles from md5sum files on purpose, becuase that info is
> duplicated elsewhere. So every debhelper package with a conffile gets a
> linitan error message.
Good point. (The current Lintian script simply unpacks the .deb and
compares _all_ files in that directory tree against the md5sums files.
With that, conffiles are also covered.)
So the question is: should a md5sums file contain conffiles too?
> We need to get a consensus on whether
>
> 1. md5sum files should be required by policy.
[snip]
Note, that md5sums was only introduced by deb-make some time ago and never
has been widely discussed. AFAIR, a better solution than md5sums files
would be to store more information about the unpacked files, as setuid
bits, etc.
Thanks,
Chris
-- Christian Schwarz
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