Re: Please add lzip support in the repository
<mariabisen@gmail.com> writes:
> First of all, thank you for your kind and sympathetic message. I'm
> referring to the second option you mentioned. We are using gcc, and it
> seems that a reason to not use lzip in gcc is that Debian doesn't
> support source tarballs in lzip format.
Oh, you're concerned with what upstream tarballs Debian can consume
without repackaging.
I don't see any reason why this should prevent GCC from releasing tarballs
compressed with lzip if they want to. They certainly wouldn't stop
releasing tarballs in other formats, for a host of reasons, and Debian can
just use one of the other formats.
In other words, this is a "fake" dependency; there is nothing about
Debian's tools or formats that prevents GCC from releasing tarballs with
lzip.
Debian is the last project that you should wait for to make a decision
like this. We're very unlikely to adopt lzip as a native upstream tarball
format until it is in very widespread use elsewhere. (That's the pattern
followed with previous formats except for lzma, and I think our somewhat
premature adoption of lzma support is now seen as a mistake we shouldn't
repeat.) We are *extremely* conservative about source package formats
because, once we adopt one, we have to support it for nearly forever;
phasing one out again is quite difficult.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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