Re: Base binary packages using xz instead of gzip

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Hi!

[ CCing Joey, as he was one of the people who seemed to care about this
  at the time, and might be able to improve the current situation, if
  he still cares, see below. ]

On Mon, 2014-09-01 at 13:30:55 +0100, Simon McVittie wrote:
> On 01/09/14 12:33, Guillem Jover wrote:
> > It seems there's quite many binary packages in the base system using
> > xz as compressor instead of gzip, since the switch to xz as default,
> > which might make debootstrapping from non-Debian systems harder.
> 
> According to your report, 145 out of 166 base packages use xz, and
> nobody seems to have even noticed until now? I think that could be
> considered to be evidence in favour of "nobody actually minds; xz all
> round!" and a smaller download for the remaining 21 base system packages...

Oh, but that could be simply because people on such systems debootstrap
stable and not unstable? Here the checks again but with stable instead.
With COMP=xz gives 5 with COMP=gz it gives 130, because the dpkg-deb
default only got switched in 1.17.0. The 5 affected packages in wheezy
are (which are not installed by all debootstrap variants):

  aptitude-common aptitude traceroute vim-common vim-tiny

> As far as I can tell, the only additional requirement imposed on those
> non-Debian systems is "you must have xzcat(1)"; and that could easily be
> obtained by unpacking, for instance, wheezy's busybox-static. (sid's
> busybox-static is xz-compressed.)

Yeah, as I mentioned at the time I don't really mind either way, it's
just something I noticed and wanted to let people who might care to
be aware of the current situation, some time before the freeze.

On Mon, 2014-09-01 at 13:33:35 +0200, Guillem Jover wrote:
> I think a
> lintian check would be pretty easy (which could key on the Priority of
> the packages), and might help people to know when to compress using
> gzip, as long as the archive override is kept up-to-date, that is
> (I've to file some bugs about that).

Actually this does not make sense, because lintian does not check the
archive, and only relies on the local packages. It would need to be
some other QA tool that performs such download-only debootstrap and
checks the binary packages.

Something that comes to mind, is that dh_builddeb could check the
package Priority field in DEBIAN/control and chose gzip if it's either
required or important. That might require to update any package with
a mismatched Priority from the archive though.

Thanks,
Guillem