On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 4:11 AM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:
On 26 October 2012 08:54, Ronald Oussoren <ronaldoussoren@mac.com> wrote:
It's nice and small. The encoder is just base64.urlsafe_b64encode(digest).rstrip('=')
But is the size difference really important? The wheel file itself is compressed, and the additional amount of space needed on installation shouldn't be a problem. The advantage of using hexdigest is that both the "classic" MD5 checksum and the new tagged checksums you propose then use the same encoding for the signature.
I agree. This encoding seems to be a micro-optimisation with no real justification. I'd prefer to see hexdigest used, as (a) it means md5 is not a special case, and (b) there's not a proliferation of 1-line functions in use code doing that b64encode/strip dance.
With hexdigest, the syntax is just [algorithm=]hexdigest, where algorithm defaults to md5. Much simpler to describe and work with.
Why don't we get just get rid of the backwards-compatible (with a previous version of PEP 376) "hexdigest defaults to md5" syntax, and require name=base64 digest. Is there any code that parses the PEP 376 digest? base64 is not hard. I was a little surprised that the optional-padding versions were not already in the standard library. def urlsafe_b64encode(data): return base64.urlsafe_b64encode(data).rstrip(binary('=')) def urlsafe_b64decode(data): pad = b'=' * (4 - (len(data) & 3)) return base64.urlsafe_b64decode(data + pad)