Re: MD5 change of autoconf 2.54

[Paul Eggert]

At Mon, 23 Feb 2004 15:36:43 +0100, Marc Espie <address@hidden> writes:

> Any idea what happened to the archive, and why it suddenly changed
> checksum ?
>
> Old: a14c171d2e378a57c2251a5cf6a05058
> New: 1279acc68bf19a5e2218c346e1db32d9

I didn't have a trusted copy of the old autoconf-2.54.tgz myself, nor
did I have a trusted copy of the old checksum.  So, I recreated
autoconf-2.54.tgz from the trusted autoconf-2.54.bz2 by using (bunzip2
| gzip -9).  The "old" autoconf-2.54.tgz and the "new" one are not
byte-for-byte identical, perhaps due to vagaries in gzip
implementations and/or timestamps in the gzip file itself (I didn't
bother to check).

> a lot of people use cryptographic hashes to ascert the validity of
> source files

Sorry, I didn't see any other way to regenerate that file in a
trustworthy way.  At this point I'm afraid it's water under the
bridge; next time we'll try to keep trusted copies around ourselves.