On Aug 1, 2009, at 2:10 AM, Chris Morgan wrote:

CRC32 checksums purely for the reason of storage; it saves almost 9MB. I'm not sure what speed is like, but I would expect CRC32 to be faster as well, as it is a simpler routine, I understand.

Well... for a baseline Windows machine (even the cheapest Dell I could find) things starting at 320GB are around the minimum nowadays. That would translate to saving 0.0003% on a new low-end PC's hard drive.

Probably a better number might be to see what % of the overall Inkscape use that would be.

Anyway, for many use cases size is not the main factor. For some it might be, though, so we should identify those.

With CRC32 there is a much higher chance of false matches than with MD5.

So it basically comes down to a size-vs-safety tradeoff.