[RFC] gnuwin32/kde-windows package format

[Michael G. Hansen]

Saro Engels wrote:
> II.2. The .mft file should contain a list of all files (relative path) 
> which are contained in the package, then one space character and then 
> the md5 sum of the file. This is the opposite of the output of md5sum.
> The .mft file, the .ver file and the .cmd file do not need a md5 sum and 
> get appended to the original list.
Are the md5sums just for checking for errors in the package or are they 
supposed to be used for signing a package? I think it would be nice to 
have the additional option of providing an additional file containing a 
gpg-signature of the .mft. It would also be good to have other checksums 
like SHA as an option in case we later want to change the type of 
checksum when MD5 is not considered secure any more. Maybe the format 
could be like this:
md5: path_to_file md5sum_of_file
sha1: path_to_file sha1sum_of_file
Also, why use the opposite way of md5sum's output?

> II.3. In the first line of the .ver file there has to be the name of the 
> package, followed by a space and the version of the package, followed by 
> a space or a colon and a space and one out of 'Binaries', 'Developer 
> Files', 'Documentation' or 'Sources'. The case of those tags should be 
> ignored. If present, the second line starts again with the packagename, 
> optionally followed by a colon, followed by a space character and 
> followed by the description of the package (within that line).
I think an encoding should be specified for the package-description 
(UTF-8?). Another issue is localization of the description. Debian for 
example is starting to provide localizations of package descriptions. 
How about:
kate:en: A text editor
kate:de: Ein Text-Editor
This opens up the possibility of translation for later.

Greetings,
Mike