Misleading package name

We have an md5deep package that includes hashdeep exec. Hashdeep is actually capable of several hash algorithms, including sha256, and also capable of multithreaded operation. All this makes hashdeep be a lot more useful and encompassing that just an md5deep exec. Hashdeep should at the very least be the name of the package. It makes no sense to search of md5deep when looking for a sha256 deep hash.

While we have some exceptions where we deviate from upstream names (say, prefixing Python packages with python-), we strive to follow upstream when naming Fedora packages. Find more details in the Naming Guidelines. Renaming the package isn’t possible, so someone would have to go submit a renamed package for review as if this were a new package.

Anyway, the package you mention probably started out as being about MD5 only and grew functionality about other types of hashes later. It’s peculiar in that the upstream seems to have moved to a hashdeep project on GitHub (which hasn’t seen changes since 2017), but the latest release still uses the md5deep name for the source archive.

If you want to make hashdeep a more prominent feature of the package, you could add this information to the description of it and e.g. submit a pull request for the change.

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That would all be fine and dandy, but the package is stale (last release 2014) and not maintained. So it’s unclear if anyone would address any issues with the package. What to do in that case?

I meant, to the Fedora package repo so its description is updated which would make the package easier to discover.

I see. Well, I mean, it’s not hard to discover because you just do dnf provides hashdeep, and you know which package it’s a part of.