Potentially forking bzip2 (was: Re: Removing bzip2 support from apt due to rustification)
Hi!
On Thu, 2019-06-06 at 23:35:28 +0200, Julian Andres Klode wrote:
> 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.
Argh. :( I've stated this many times in the past, but just to make it
clear, I'm not planning on removing support for extraction using
previously supported compression algorithms. bzip2 is already
considered obsolete (and disallowed) at «dpkg-deb --build» time, but
dpkg-deb will happily extract old packages using it.
> 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.
Yes, this would pretty much make bzip2 a (currently) non-portable
project.
So I really, really, do not want to do it, and I'd rather spend my
time elsewhere, but if it comes to it, and no one else does it before,
I guess I'll have to consider forking prior to its rustification. :(
> [1] https://people.gnome.org/~federico/blog/maintaining-bzip2.html
Thanks,
Guillem
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