Re: Base binary packages using xz instead of gzip
On Tue, 2 Sep 2014, Ondřej Surý wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 2, 2014, at 10:24, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> > I know, but if systems on which xz-utils is not easily available really
> > exist then the interested parties could replace it with xzdec which is
> > small and statically linked.
>
> Is there such system or are we having an academic debate again?
xz-utils are not very portable to old/weird systems.
I could imagine someone wanting to run debootstrap, which
can IIRC work with just sh and ar and tar, on FreeMiNT on
an Atari.
But even there, the recommended method of installing
Debian/m68k is currently to start from either a tarball
or an ext2fs filesystem image one can dd(1) to the HDD
(I even took care to generate it on MirBSD using ext2fs
revision 0 and no new features¹, so that other OSes with
extremely basic ext2fs support can read/write it, prior
to rebooting into it). Only problem with that is kernel
modules (if needed, one can always crosscompile a custom
initial kernel, though). But I’m sure the m68k porters
will want to work on getting d-i back, anyway.
So, I’d say that restricting the base system to gzip
is no longer necessary for jessie. (Even though the
idea to build a statically linked xzdec for the host
OS is hard, e.g. where to find a libc that works with
its old kernel in the Linux case, etc.) But do make
sure to keep it to xz -6, at worst -7, never -9.
① Apparently, modern Linux kernels do not manage to
leave the filesystem alone in those cases, and
always introduce features that some old OSes don’t
support.
bye,
//mirabilos
--
[16:04:33] bkix: "veni vidi violini"
[16:04:45] bkix: "ich kam, sah und vergeigte"...
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