Re: Base binary packages using xz instead of gzip

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Hi!

On Mon, 2014-09-01 at 13:33:35 +0200, 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. After
> running the follwing:
> 
>   $ debootstrap --download-only sid sid-root-path
>   $ cd sid-root-path
>   $ find -name '*.deb' | while read deb; do \
>       if ar t $deb | grep -q data\.tar\.$COMP; then \
>         echo $deb; \
>       fi \
>     done | sort
> 
> with COMP=xz gives 145 packages, with COMP=gz it gives 21. So I guess
> it would make sense to decide if people still care about bootstrapping
> from other systems where xz-utils might not be available. […]

Some time has passed and the current situation in sid is this:

  COMP=xz  →  158 packages
  COMP=gz  →  5 packages

The ones using gzip are:

  base-files_9.6_amd64.deb
  base-passwd_3.5.39_amd64.deb
  dpkg_1.18.10_amd64.deb
  mawk_1.3.3-17_amd64.deb
  sensible-utils_0.0.9_all.deb

I think we can clearly say that collectively we expect xz to be
available when bootstrapping a Debian system. :) I'm thus going to
switch dpkg.deb to use xz on the next upload. I've BCCed the other
package maintainers as a heads up, because it seems using gzip when
there's at least a single package in the base system using xz does
not make much sense anyway.

Thanks,
Guillem