Ian Jackson writes ("Bug#164889: md5sum <FILE produces spurious ` -' in
output"):
> I would like to refer bugs #164591 and #164889 (these are merged, and
> I'm the submitter of the latter) to the committee. Below you'll find
> my summary of the issue. (In the summary, `you' refers to the package
> maintainer.)
Apparently no-one has anything to add to my summary.
So, I hereby propose the following resolution:
1. The Technical Committee has considered the question of the output
format of md5sum when passed input from stdin, as discussed in
Bug#164591 and Bug#164889.
2. We have concluded that
* md5sum is significantly more useful if there is a way to
produce the `bare' output format (ie, without trailing ` -').
* For reasons of compatiblity with scripts and other software
which expects the historical bare output for `md5sum <file', it
is best if that behaviour is preserved.
* Compatibility with the historical behaviour of md5sum is more
important than compatibility with the GNU textutils version.
Therefore, `md5sum <file' should produce the bare output form,
ie the MD5 checksum's hex digits followed only by a newline.
3. We feel that the textutils md5sum should be changed to match the
historical behaviour, both for convenience and compatibility.
This is outside our formal jurisdiction, so we suggest that the
submitters of the Debian bug reports take the matter up with the
GNU coreutils maintainers.
4. Accordingly we request (or require, if the required supermajority
is reached according to the Constitution) that the dpkg
maintainers reverse the change to md5sum's behavior, as described
above.
If no-one has any further comments I'll call for a vote on this
resolution in a few days.
Ian.
PS: This all seems rather strange really - I wish someone else would
stick their oar in ...
