Re: Please add lzip support in the repository

[Adrian Bunk <bunk@debian.org>]

On Thu, Jun 15, 2017 at 08:30:33PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> <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.
>...

GCC is actually pretty much the worst example for two reasons:

First, Debian already repackages the upstream tarballs (to .tar.xz)
for reasons unrelated to the compression format (GFDL).

Second, the GCC tarball (the repackaged .tar.xz) is inside the sources 
and manually unpacked during the build.

cu
Adrian

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