At 2025-11-23T14:52:56-0800, Collin Funk wrote: > Assuming that I am reading your proposal with no prior knowledge, I > think your proposed phrasing would raise the question "Do others, not > coreutils developers, know how to modify a file to produce the same > checksum?"
That's a good question to ask oneself! > Also, I'm not sure if the coreutils developers count as expert > knowledge in cryptographic hash functions. I certainly don't have the > qualifications for it. My understanding is that there is no debate on > whether the listed algorithms can be used for secure checksums. That's mine as well, and I claim no special expertise in (purportedly) one-way hashes. I read the metaphorical newspapers like everybody else and know that MD5 got busted, and not long after that SHA-1 was shown to be weaker than originally supposed. Expertise is (almost?) always relative. While for the sake of one's own humility one should write with awareness of the possibility of a cryptanalyst at the NSS or MSS quietly reading the coreutils manual and smirking at its authors' naïveté, many more readers are ordinary people just trying to have fun or get work done on a GNU system. At least some of the latter audience will communicate with the development team. Crypto spooks will not--not about a vulnerability unknown to the public. The "shred" utility is in a similar boat, I think. Real confidence in secure data deletion demands physical destruction of the storage device. > Interesting. I like lists because I can skim through the preceding > sentence and see the items it applies to. Lists are fine and I don't discourage them, merely the shiftless abandonment of one's sentential responsibilities. It's fine to display a list clearly outside of a sentential context. > Maybe that is an issue with me being lazy, though. More likely with other documentation writers being lazy and unconsciously absorbing their poor habits. The more practice I get with technical writing, the more critical I get of all of it, not least including my own work of months ago--let alone years. At the risk of citing too familiar a resource, George Orwell is my lodestar in this and other respects. https://sites.duke.edu/scientificwriting/orwells-6-rules/ > I pushed the patch adding "currently" as Pádraig suggested to help > with that [3]. That was before I saw your message, otherwise I would > have waited a bit. Sorry about that. No worries. A manual is never finished--only snapshotted. :) Regards, Branden
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