On Wednesday, April 19, "Noel L Yap" wrote:
> All this talk of probabilities and possibilities took us on a tangent. It's
> occurred to me that, if CVS is to compute MD5's without getting confused with
> line endings, one of the following must occur:
> 1. The server sends the file to the client so that the client can compute and
> compare the "real" file's MD5 with the local copy's MD5.
> 2. The client sends the local file to the server so the server can compute and
> compare MD5's.
> 3. The client computes the local file's MD5 (taking into consideration line
> endings for ASCII files). The server does the same computation and sends it
> over to the client so it can be compared.
> 4. I completely missed something in my analysis.
You have. The MD5 is a "client-side" thing. It is only meant to enhance
the file-modified "condition" of a file. Think "accurate timestamp".
BTW, CVS already uses MD5 sums to check for "correctness" upon patch-updates,
so to all the people that thought MD5 "may not be good enough", chances are
that you're already depending on it... :-)
--Toby.
