[Python-Dev] PEP 376 : Changing the .egg-info structure

[Tony Nelson]

At 13:52 -0400 05/15/2009, P.J. Eby wrote:
>At 08:32 AM 5/15/2009 +0200, Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven wrote:
>>Agreed. Within FreeBSD's ports the installed package registration
>>gets a MD5 hash per file recorded. Size is less interesting though,
>>since essentially this information is encapsulated within the hash.
>>Remove one byte from the file and your hash is already different.
>
>Which also means that in that case you can skip computing the
>MD5.  The size allows you to easily notice an overwrite/corruption
>without further processing.

In most cases the files will actually match, so the sizes and dates will be
the same and the checksum must be computed to verify the match.

RPM does this when asked to Verify a package.  It is faster than Removing a
package, and Verifying all installed packages takes a reasonable amount of
time.  I don't think Python would be any worse at verifying its own
packages, and it would normally have less data to verify, so it should be
fast enough.
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