Adding support for LZIP to dpkg, using that instead of xz, archive wide
Dear friends,
I've been using xz compression for a long time, but I see a big defect
which is today pushing me to turn it off for the .orig.tar file. The
issue is that depending on the version of xz-utils, it produces a
different output.
We use "git archive" within the PKG OpenStack team to generate this
tarball (which is more or less the same as pristine-tar, except we use
upstream tags rather than a pristine-tar branch). The fact that xz
produces a different result makes it not reproducible. As a consequence,
it is very hard for us to use this system across distributions (ie: use
that in both Debian and Ubuntu, or in Sid & Jessie). We need consistency.
As a friend puts it:
"This is a fundamental problem/defect with xz. This (and a lot of other
such defects, e.g. non-robustness of xz archives that easily lead to
file corruption etc) are the reason that there is lzip (and which is why
gnu.org has, on a technical basis, decided that lzip is official
gzip-successor for gnu software releases when they come in tarballs).
So it'd be super nice to have LZIP support in dpkg, and use that instead
of xz, archive wide.
Your thoughts everyone? Is there any reason why we wouldn't do that?
Cheers,
Thomas Goirand (zigo)
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