[Python-Dev] [Distutils] accept the wheel PEPs 425, 426, 427

[Paul Moore]

On 26 October 2012 08:54, Ronald Oussoren <ronaldoussoren at 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.

Paul.