Debian packages without md5sums
Random testing of my local Debian mirror shows that 644 binary packages
out of 20774 (3.1%) are missing the DEBIAN/md5sums control file. This
file (used by debsums) is very useful to check for disk corruption,
and even though debsums can generate the data on the fly when a package
is installed, it's better to have this information computed at build
time.
So if your packages use debhelper, make sure that you have the proper
dh_md5sums call in debian/rules. If you don't use debhelper, you'll
have to generate the DEBIAN/md5sums control file manually (see
dh_md5sums's source for inspiration). If you use a high-level build
tool like CDBS, you probably don't have to do anything.
Should I file bugs against the 446 affected source packages? A few maintainers apparently exclude some binary packages on purpose; for example the zsh source package generates md5sums for zsh, zsh-static and zsh-doc, but not for zsh-dev and zsh-dbg...
Update: updated statistics with a run on a full amd64+all mirror.
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