On Wed, 3 May 2000, John Refling wrote:

> By the way, do we have some way of checksumming the CONTENTS of
> a file?
> 
> This becomes an issue when we fetch files from a ftp server which
> dynamically tars the data... the dates of the files on the server
> may change from time to time due to the server's administrative
> functions, even if contents doesn't.  Our current system will fail
> in those cases.
> 
> I'm manually trying something like in pre-extract:
> 
> tar -O -zxf ${DISTDIR}/${DIST_SUBDIR}/${DISTFILE} | ${MD5}
> 
> to checksum only the contents of the file (I hope).  Can we build
> this in (eg, CKSUMCONTENTS= ...).

That won't help if each mirror inserts it's own "INDEX00" file or two,
as CTAN mirrors do. Maybe it would be more elegant to add an option to
change the order of the targets, to checksum the extracted files (the
EXTRACT_ONLY list) only after extracting them.