1259941 - Text files in download area should have name extension ".txt" as additional information for users

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(SeaMonkey :: Release Engineering, enhancement)

Description

[Rainer Bielefeld]

Currently release download folders at <http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/seamonkey/> contain plain text documents README, MD5SUMS, SHA1SUMS.

I would prefer names README.txt, MD5SUMS.txt, SHA1SUMS.txt

Comment 1

[Philip Chee]

(In reply to Rainer Bielefeld from comment #0)
> Currently release download folders at
> <http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/seamonkey/> contain plain text documents README,
> MD5SUMS, SHA1SUMS.
> 
> I would prefer names README.txt, MD5SUMS.txt, SHA1SUMS.txt

I'll leave it up to our RelEng team to decide but:
1. Firefox uses SHA1SUMS and not SHA1SUMS.txt
2. We should stop generating MD5SUMS or at least use something more cryptographically more secure
3. README is obviously text. SHA1SUMS is obviously text also. adding .txt adds no value

Comment 2

[Rainer Bielefeld]

(In reply to Philip Chee from comment #1)
> adding .txt  adds no value

The value would be that user and programs have a better hunch what kind of file they see and what helper application will be required to open and read it. More complex document types like .html or .pdf have internal hints concerning document type, what at least is useful for software to find out what kind of document (or program) it is, nevertheless it is good manners to use the name extension in document names. Even more useful the name extension is useful for these plain text documents, what do not have internal document type hints. Are they continuous text? Or CSV? Or something completely different? This question would not exist with a name extension. Meaning of "MD5SUMS" or "SHA1SUMS" is not in the education canon of a  humanistic general education ;-)

But I wonder whether there is a technical rule to use file names MD5SUMS, SHA1SUMS without name extension? 

But README definitively should be changed to README.txt, README.md is not uncommon.

 Different to

Comment 3

[Stefan [:stefanh]]

Actually, the bad thing here is that the files are sent with content-type "binary/octet-stream"...

Comment 4

[Edmund Wong (:ewong)]

Clearing my needinfos.

Having given it some thought, unless Callek disagrees, I'm going to confirm this and put it up
for the next release and other places.

Comment 5

[Edmund Wong (:ewong)]

another option is to rename the README to README.txt and the sha1sum/md5sum files can be
renamed to SHA1.sum and MD5.sum.

Just looked at a gnu http site and it had .sum files.  Clicking on them actually showed
their contents.

Comment 6

[Edmund Wong (:ewong)]

Though the next future website change will need the following done:

https://hg.mozilla.org/SeaMonkey/seamonkey-project-org/file/tip/src/releases/index.en.html#l107

instead of <a href="[% INCLUDE download_file path='MD5SUMS' %]">MD5

we have:
<a href="[% INCLUDE download_file path='MD5.sum' %]">MD5

similar for sha1sums

Comment 7

[Ian Neal]

This was done in bug 1602735 (2.53.1 b1 release) and should happen on all future releases.