On bz2 compression in debs

[Romain Francoise <rfrancoise@debian.org>]

Hi,

In the past few days I've been making random tests on the whole
archive, and found two binary packages that my tools couldn't handle
because they use bz2 compression of the data tarball.

That is to say, they don't have the data.tar.gz member but have a
data.tar.bz2 member instead.  This format has been supported by dpkg
since 2004, and can be enabled by passing the '-Z bzip2' option to
dpkg-deb (usually via dh_builddeb).  The two packages are
doc-linux-html and doc-linux-nonfree-html:

$ ar t doc-linux-html_2007.08-2_all.deb
debian-binary
control.tar.gz
data.tar.bz2
$ dpkg -I doc-linux-html_2007.08-2_all.deb | head -1
 new debian package, version 2.0.
$

I'm trying to determine if this is policy compliant.  Policy has the
following to say about the .deb format:

| B. Binary packages (from old Packaging Manual)
| ----------------------------------------------
|
|      The binary package has two main sections.  The first part consists of
|      various control information files and scripts used by `dpkg' when
|      installing and removing.  See Section B.2, `Package control
|      information files'.
|
|      The second part is an archive containing the files and directories to
|      be installed.
|
|      In the future binary packages may also contain other components, such
|      as checksums and digital signatures.  The format for the archive is
|      described in full in the `deb(5)' man page.

and deb(5) says:

| The third, last required member is named data.tar.gz.  It contains
| the filesystem archive as a gzipped tar archive.

Note 'required'.

So my questions are:

 1) If deb(5) is authoritative, am I right in thinking that bz2
    compression is a policy violation at the moment?

 2) Doesn't the disappearance of 'data.tar.gz' warrant a bump of the
    binary version number, from 2.0 to, say, 3.0?

See also:
  http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=34727
  http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/10/msg02053.html
  http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=438486

Thanks for any insight,

-- 
  ,''`.
 : :' :        Romain Francoise <rfrancoise@debian.org>
 `. `'         http://people.debian.org/~rfrancoise/
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