File/code integrity check module? (+POC)

Ladies, Gentlemen,

We all have made them once or twice and we're probably all deeply ashamed of it... Here at Madcap, we call them "core hacks".

Sometimes you can save yourself (and your client) a lot of trouble and dev hours if you'd just alter Drupal's core files a little, but it always comes back to bite you when your upgrading your copy of Drupal...

And those of you that don't do pesky core hacks: you might like to check if the upgrade went well and all changed files are uploaded correctly, but how?

I came up with a module yesterday that searches for altered and missing files. (In the future, you'll also be able to acknowledge an alteration)

This is not a security related module(!) as both the hashes and the files are stored on your own server, it's merely an easy tool to check if your code is still the way you've downloaded it...

Please check out my proof-of-concept module, which has a few hashes available for Drupal 6.2 and 6.3 at http://img.sait.nl/file_integrity-6.x-0.0.tar.gz and tell me what you think of such an approach... It's still full of debug code and other junk, but it works for now.

Usage:
* Download & install on Drupal 6.2 or 6.3
* Run cron
* Check your status page

Cheers!

Harold.