Checksums (Re: [PATCH]: svndiff version 1)

This isn't strictly related to your changes, but since you're digging
around in this stuff anyway: I noticed not so long ago that the MD5
checksums stored in each diff representation were always all-bytes-zero.
I'm sure this is a straightforward bug to find and fix.

On a larger scale, I'd like to put forward the proposal that
*everything* we store in the database should have a checksum attached
to it. MD5 is probably overkill for everything but the strings table;
however, I want Subversion to detect and report immediately when a
disk block has gone south, causing a chunk of data in the middle of a
storage pool to be overwritten with NUL bytes.

This is not a hypothetical problem; it has happened repeatedly to
GCC's CVS repository. Because RCS doesn't validate ,v files, it can
go unnoticed for years, and then good luck finding a backup to restore
that block from.

Perhaps this is already taken care of by BDB, but then why do we have
checksums in svndiff representation entries?

zw

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Received on Sat Oct 21 14:37:09 2006