Filename for digests

[David Shaw]

On Sat, Jul 16, 2005 at 10:44:52PM -0000, Greg Sabino Mullane wrote:
> 
> 
> > Yes, I agree that the standard format is the best one to use, but I was
> > asking about the name of the file, not it's format. For example, if I'm
> > going to share a directory with 1000 files, it would be inconvenient to
> > save each file's hash as a separate file, and just add a .sha1 extension
> > (resulting in 2000 files). So therefore I would store all the hashes in
> > one file. But what should this file be called? sha1sums? hashes.sha1?
> > digests.sha1? Is the .sha1 extension important?
> 
> One pseudo-standard in place is to use uppercase for important meta-files
> like README and INSTALL. One named "CHECKSUMS" or "CHECKSUMS.sha1"
> should stand out enough. A signed version could be "CHECKSUMS.asc"
> or even CHECKSUMS.sha1.asc, etc.

Red Hat and others use a filename of "MD5SUM", which is a clearsigned
file containing the human readable MD5 hashes.  I like your CHECKSUMS
idea better since MD5 isn't the way to go any longer.

David