[Biopython] Community help needed to verify checksums for past releases

[Peter Cock]

Dear Biopython developers,

Thank you to everyone who has helped with the website
migration to GitHub - I think this has gone pretty well overall:

https://biopython.org

The good news is the new GitHub Pages website seems to
be working nicely, and during this we've updated a lot of older
content. While there is still lots to fine tune, for me this is the
biggest remaining issue:

*Providing all the past releases via GitHub Pages*
https://github.com/biopython/biopython.github.io/issues/7

The sudden Biopython website migration was forced by the old
server failing after it was hacked to host spam advertising.
I would like your help here with verifying the checksums of our
past releases before putting them back online - just in case any
of the files rescued from the old server were corrupted when it
was hacked to host spam adverts. All the files checked so far
are fine, so this is likely just me being paranoid.

If anyone has old cached Biopython files under their Downloads
folder etc, could you reply with their checksums please?

Linux,

shasum - a 256 ~/Downloads/biopython-*
md5sum ~/Downloads/biopython-*

Mac OS X,

shasum - a 256 ~/Downloads/biopython-*
md5 ~/Downloads/biopython-*

(Checksum tools suggestions for Windows welcome)

You can use the mailing list, GitHub issue, or email me directly:
https://github.com/biopython/biopython.github.io/issues/7

Don't worry about repeating checksums for files other people
have reported, a little duplication here is a good thing ;)

With hindsight it would have been good security practice to have
included the checksums of our releases with the Biopython release
announcements (and SHA256 would be better than MD5). We'll
do that in future:

https://github.com/biopython/biopython.github.io/issues/56

Thank you,

Peter

(Speaking here as a Biopython developer. I am also the on
the Open Bioinformatics Foundation board as the current
secretary, and volunteer to do some of the lighter SysAdmin
work on the OBF servers)