About package review and mismatching md5sums

[Michael Schwendt]

On Wed, 29 Jun 2011 12:59:41 +0530 (IST), PJP (P) wrote:

> One of the package review guideline says
> 
> ===
> MUST: The sources used to build the package must match the 
> upstream source, as provided in the spec URL. Reviewers should use 
> md5sum for this task.
> ===

It says more than that:

| If no upstream URL can be specified for this package, please see the
| Source URL Guidelines for how to deal with this.

 -> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/SourceURL
  -> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/SourceURL#Using_Revision_Control

That is the guideline that's releveant.

> Past couple of days, I've been reviewing the python grapefruit package 
> 
> 
>   at - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=716808
> 
> and the thing is, the spec file provides an - $ svn export -r 31 ... - command to pull the sources and create a tarball using $ tar -czvf ...
> 
> But as it turns out, it seems, if you create a tarball from the *very same* sources on two different machines, they don't match. As in the md5sum for the two tarball differs.
> 

Examine whether the uncompressed tarball differs already due to file
timestamps or file system differences. A simple md5sum isn't helpful in
that case. You would verify an svn snapshot tarball with a full tree diff,
possibly deleting the revision control maintenance directories beforehand.