Re: Removing bzip2 support from apt due to rustification
On Thu, Jun 06, 2019 at 05:44:27PM -0400, Boyuan Yang wrote:
> 在 2019-06-06四的 23:35 +0200，Julian Andres Klode写道：
> > Hi folks,
> >
> > seeing that Federico Mena Quintero has taken over bzip2 development
> > and is in the process of porting it to Rust[1], we should consider
> > removing bzip2 support from apt, dpkg, etc. following the release
> > of buster.
> >
> > My understanding is that having APT depend on a library written in
> > Rust severily hurts its portability, and makes it hard to support
> > for stable releases, as Rust is a fairly fast moving target.
> >
> > I do not believe that bzip2 is a useful algorithm in todays world,
> > and we should look at migrating any remaining bzip2-only things
> > (translation files I think) to xz or zstd.
>
> I do remember there's still some source packages / binary packages in Debian
> using the bzip2 format. If we are going to do that (which looks reasonable,
> BTW), a serious archive-wide scan should be made in advance to see how great
> the impact is and we need to deal with each occurrence.
>
> Another issue is that the new toolchain (apt/dpkg/...) will not be able to
> handle old packages using bzip2. Why not make the bzip2 support optional (like
> a plugin or something similar)?
Both apt and dpkg are capable of falling back to executing the bzip2 binary
where available. Well, in theory anyway. I'm not sure it works reliably.
For APT, the impact of removing bzip2 support is a bit more limited
than for dpkg; it "only" breaks apt-extracttemplates, apt-ftparchive,
support for Translation-*.bz2 indexes (which are the only ones we ship
right now (Bug#930103), and python-apt clients using apt_inst to inspect
bzip2 debs.
The risk there seems limited enough, and one thing you can expect from
a 2.0 version bump.
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