[debhelper-devel] Bug#776853: Bug#776853: dh_md5sums: please remove lines 80-84 + line 87

[Niels Thykier]

clone 776853 -1
reassign -1 lintian
retitle -1 lintian: Please permit empty md5sums files
block 776853 by -1
thanks

On 2015-02-02 15:18, Rhonda D'Vine wrote:
> Package: debhelper
> Version: 9.20120909
> Severity: minor
> 
> Dear Maintainer,
> 
>  the dh_md5sums script contains line to explicitly not package an empty
> md5sums file.  This complexity doesn't really gain us anything anymore
> since dpkg does create missing md5sums files on installation since
> 1.16.3.  The reasoning given thus is flawed and wrong.  It only saves a
> few bytes in the data.tar.gz of the package, which is not really worth
> the complexity.
> 
>  Thanks,
> Rhonda
> 

Hi Rhonda,

Thanks for the report.

I am pretty that change would cause a "control-file-is-empty" tag from
lintian.  So at the very least, Lintian should permit the md5sums file
to be empty before we implement this.

On the lintian side, we would need to change checks/control-files.pm:
"""
        if ($file->size == 0) {
            tag 'control-file-is-empty', $file;
        }
"""

*and* probably also checks/md5sums.pm:
"""
    # Is it empty? Then skip it. Tag will be issued by control-files
    return if $control->size == 0;
"""

Thanks,
~Niels