On Sun, 10 Dec 1995, Bruce Perens wrote: > Everybody has problems with truncated uploads, etc. Generally they can't > fix them by themselves. I wanted to repair this by automating the FTP > archive process to check against the changes file and then move the file > into place. Ian Murdock objected to this as he wanted to manage the FTP > archive by hand. I think we should arrive at a happy medium - uploads > are verified against their .changes file and moved into an accessable > area that is not their final resting place. Ian can then move them, with > the confidence that their integrity has been checked, to their place in > the archive.
This sounds good. The only part I objected to is having a script actually move the packages into the archive. I frequently make judgement calls that a script cannot possible make (or, at least, make reliably). I certainly don't have a problem using a script for automatic processing. I'm not sure what you meant by "verified against their .changes file", but the script probably shouldn't verify against .changes files that are uploaded. It should use the md5sum from the debian-changes announcement. That way, it'll be harder to get a bogus package into the distribution, and package maintainers will be forced to announce their packages before they upload them to ftp.debian.org. (This has become an greater problem in the last months for some reason.)
