Re: Please add lzip support in the repository

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Paul Wise writes ("Re: Please add lzip support in the repository"):
> On Thu, Jun 15, 2017 at 9:05 PM, Christoph Biedl wrote:
> > I'm not keen on extending regular expressions like
> >
> >     \.(gz|bz2|lzma|xz)$
> >
> > that I have in many places again and again.
> 
> That sort of hard-coding should stop, if you see it somewhere please
> switch to using apt, either via the apt libraries or via apt-helper
> cat-file.

What is `apt-helper cat-file' and how does it help ?

I don't find it on my stretch system, let alone on jessie.  Presumably
the caller (usually some kind of script) would have to parse its
output.

Rather, if you want to lift this out of individual programs, it should
be provided as a bare regexp fragment in per-language libraries.  That
would reduce the number of different places to edit to a dozen or so.

Ian.