R devel - May 2015 - Wrongly checked MD5 checksums in R 3.2.0's windows binary

Dear R-devel members,

Several R user recently reported
<https://github.com/talgalili/installr/issues/30> (while using the
installr
<http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/installr>package) that when
running
MD5 checksums on a recent R installation (R 3.2.0), they get that the files
?bin/R.exe?, ?bin/Rscript.exe?
have the wrong MD5 checksums on Windows.

I intend to remove the test for these files in the next version of
installr, but I thought this might interest people to know.

With regards,
Tal

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

>>>>> Tal Galili <tal.galili at gmail.com>
>>>>>     on Sun, 10 May 2015 23:13:09 +0300 writes:
    > Dear R-devel members, Several R user recently reported
    > <https://github.com/talgalili/installr/issues/30> (while
    > using the installr
    > <http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/installr>package)
    > that when running MD5 checksums on a recent R installation
    > (R 3.2.0), they get that the files ?bin/R.exe?,
    > ?bin/Rscript.exe? have the wrong MD5 checksums on Windows.

    > I intend to remove the test for these files in the next
    > version of installr, but I thought this might interest
    > people to know.

Well, one could argue that this is a bug in your package.

Here is what I do on our CRAN mirror, inside the
  bin/windows/base  directory :

$ md5sum R-3.2.0-win.exe
c3f8654826ce772d0105373b85804b0d  R-3.2.0-win.exe
$ cat md5sum.txt
c3f8654826ce772d0105373b85804b0d *R-3.2.0-win.exe

and so I conclude that the MD5 sum is correct.
In case of doubt, I rather trust a human than an algorithm, but
it seems that I'm slowly becoming part of a minority .. ;-( ;-)

So the bug might be that your package code gets upset by the "*"
before the R  ?
.... and that may also be the glitch on the CRAN maintainer side..


    > With regards, Tal

    > 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I know that you know better, Tal ;-)

Best regards,
Martin

On 11 May 2015, at 09:53 , Martin Maechler <maechler at
lynne.stat.math.ethz.ch> wrote:
>>>>>> Tal Galili <tal.galili at gmail.com>
>>>>>>    on Sun, 10 May 2015 23:13:09 +0300 writes:
> 
>> Dear R-devel members, Several R user recently reported
>> <https://github.com/talgalili/installr/issues/30> (while
>> using the installr
>> <http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/installr>package)
>> that when running MD5 checksums on a recent R installation
>> (R 3.2.0), they get that the files ?bin/R.exe?,
>> ?bin/Rscript.exe? have the wrong MD5 checksums on Windows.
> 
>> I intend to remove the test for these files in the next
>> version of installr, but I thought this might interest
>> people to know.
> 
> Well, one could argue that this is a bug in your package.
> 
...especially since this seems to be about executable files _after_ install, not
the installer binaries. I don't think we provide the md5sums for those, do
we?

-- 
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Office: A 4.23
Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com