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.
16 August 2007
Debian packages without md5sums
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6 comments:
What about filing a bug against lintian/linda, so that this kind of things didn't get unnoticed anymore?
That would also let people wanting to exclude some packages able to do so, by adding a (possibly documented) override.
I guess that you could also use dd-list to mail everyone easily, in case you don't want to play with massive bug filing.
lintian has been testing for this for a while, but it's only an info tag at present. There was some debate over whether it should be a requirement, so I hadn't increased the level of the tag.
I'd suggest it should be at least a warning to not have an md5sums file.
I agree that having a lintian warning for this would be nice. I'll move the discussion to debian-devel so see what people think.
Today's upgrade showed the following change:
zsh (4.3.4-14) unstable; urgency=low
* Ship md5sums for zsh-dev and zsh-dbg.
-- Clint Adams <schizo@debian.org> Thu, 16 Aug 2007 19:44:20 -0400
You might like to note that there is now an automatically updated list of these generated daily at http://people.debian.org/~rfrancoise/md5sum-check/.
* Alphabetical list of packages
* List of packages by maintainer
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