Re: .deb format: let's use 0.939, zstd, drop bzip2

[Ansgar <ansgar@debian.org>]

Adam Borowski writes:
> I've recently did some research on how can we improve the speed of unpacking
> packages.  There's a lot of other stages that can be improved, but let's
> talk about the .deb format.
>
> First, the 0.939 format, as described in "man deb-old".  While still being
> accepted by dpkg, it had been superseded before even the very first stable
> release.  Why?  It has at least two upsides over 2.0:

Switching to a different binary format will break various tools.  If we
want to do this, I wonder if we shouldn't take the chance to move away
from tar?

We have various applications that only want to extract single members of
the package (changelog, NEWS, copyright, ...); tar is a really bad
format for such an operation.  Other formats (zip, 7z, ...) are more
suited for them.

Ansgar