[Distutils] New draft of PEP, and list of licenses

[Mark W. Alexander]

On Sat, 17 Mar 2001, Sean Reifschneider wrote:

> Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2001 01:16:15 -0700
> From: Sean Reifschneider <jafo@tummy.com>
> To: Andrew Kuchling <akuchlin@mems-exchange.org>,
>      Distutils-sig <distutils-sig@python.org>
> Subject: Re: [Distutils] New draft of PEP, and list of licenses
> 
> On Thu, Mar 15, 2001 at 12:51:50PM -0600, s-thapa-11@alumni.uchicago.edu wrote:
> >  An optional size field would also be useful but can be left out until
> >2.2
> 
> My concern with that is having it get out of sync.  "Ok, now I've built
> an HP-UX sd archive of this package, I just need to copy the meta-data
> over and...

> It would also be useful to have an MD5 and/or signature, but it runs into
> similar problems.  However, I can say that in swalow it's very nice to
> have these fields.  I use size and md5sum to verify a good download, and
> if they don't both match it goes on to another URL listed to try getting
> another copy of it.

Both size and MD5 could only apply to the distutils archive. Binary
packages produced in any format will have different sizes and
signatures. I agree that they're usefull, but they'd need to be
provided by the binary package routines and how they would be
handled depends on that particular package manager. 

Unless the catalog manages the size and signatures of all files
under it's control, but that raises the issue of whether the
numbers can be trusted.

mwa