Re: Switching default dpkg-source compressor for V2+ formats to xz

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

On Tue, 2013-08-13 at 11:12:16 +0900, Mike Hommey wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 03:52:51AM +0200, Guillem Jover wrote:
> > I'd like to switch the default dpkg-source compressor to xz for V2+
> > (not for V1) source formats, as suggested by Ansgar Burchardt in [0].
> > 
> >   [0] <http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2013/05/msg00377.html>
> > 
> > After having switched the default dpkg-deb compressor to xz in 1.17.0,
> > it only makes sense to update the new source formats too, more so when
> > an increasing number of packages are getting switched manually. And
> > given that there should be less of an issue wrt compatibility with
> > other systems, compared to .deb packages.
> > 
> > So if there's no strong opposition, this would probably happen around
> > dpkg 1.17.3 or thereabouts.
> 
> Is there actually much to win with this, since this is going to only
> affect -debian.tar.*?

There's the native packages too (see dpkg itself for example). Probably
not as much global gain as with binary packages, but the gain is
significant at least for native packages. In any case I think trying
to standardize on a single compressor across the board is a good thing,
and if people are going to be manually switching packages anyway, I'd
rather do it just once centrally.

Thanks,
Guillem