Description Denis Roy 2010-06-14 16:04:31 EDT

Created attachment 171868 [details]
Screenshot

We encourage the community to download our bits from the mirror of their choice; however, we don't make it easy to find the MD5/SHA checksums for the the files downloaded.  If we make checksums more visible, it will encourage the community to verify their downloaded bits with those available on the home site.

The end goal here is to encourage safe downloading.

I have a simple solution for implementing this, which would require a bit of PHP code and zero project/committer involvement:

For any given file, when we present the mirror list to the user, the checksums can be displayed next to the link as per the attached screenshot.  The mirror selection mechanisms require us to maintain an index of download files, their total download count as well as their size on disk.  We could just add a couple of columns for md5 and sha1 checksums and display those as well.

When a file is downloaded for the very first time, checksums would not be available since the file record is new.  However, a background process would run to calculate the checksums for those files that do not have one and place them in the database table for subsequent downloaders.