Re: Wheezy release: CDs are not big enough any more...

[Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>]

Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> writes:

> Adam Borowski wrote:
>> Could you please mention which ones do not?  And if so, how are they
>> relevant/are they fixable?
>
> As one of the maintainers of debootstrap, I am perhaps more aware than
> some how broadly it's used. Ok..
>
> They use it on Android (41,600 hits including http://evilzone.org/android/debian-on-android/)
> They use it on Nokia (96,600 hits)
> They use it on Nook (14,000 hits)
> They use it on headless old Red Hat systems in a datacenter somewhere
> They use it on Debian oldstable systems, where xz-utils is not even packaged.
> They use it on absolutely modern peices of unusual kit that ship with some
> crufty busybox binary (no source naturally) from far up the supplier
> chain, that was built well before xz support entered busybox in 2010.

How are they relevant? Where do they download and unpack udebs? Where is
busybox used to unpack debs?

>> Special-casing base packages would be a lot of complexity, let's avoid that
>> if possible -- but still preferred to letting gzip stay.
>
> Base packages can be identified at build time by their priority.
> if ($priority ne 'important' && $priority ne 'required') {
> }
>
> Although I do think that rebuilding the entire archive at this point in
> the release process is probably going to result in a lot of ..
> complexity. For one, d-i relies on being able to unpack firmware .debs
> The code that does this doesn't support data.tar.xz. There are probably
> plenty more problems where that came from.

Can someone set the default to xz and recompile all of Debian or at
least base and create a repository from that for install tests?

MfG
        Goswin