Re: Correct way of providing uncompressed data.tar

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Hi!

On Thu, 2013-12-05 at 13:19:57 +0100, Roland Stigge wrote:
> in linux-source-3.11, we have an issue due to unclear procedure how to
> use uncompressed data.tar files:
> 
> http://bugs.debian.org/725492
> 
> While lintian rejects packages with data.tar (in contrast to the
> compressed data.tar.{...} variants), an uncompressed data.tar.gz that
> the kernel is currently using (dpkg-source -Xgzip -z0) triggers problems
> in apt-ftparchive.

> To implement a correct fix, Ben asked for a decision by dpkg
> maintainers, FTP team and policy. Basically, the question is if
> uncompressed data.tar is the correct way (for me, this would be the
> logical consequence), or rather uncompressed data.tar.gz as linux
> currently does, but which isn't actually gzip formatted file, or sth. else.
> 
> See also http://bugs.debian.org/718330

I've had a working fix for 718295 since end of July, but I've not
applied it as it would remove a currently used misfeature with no
substitute. As long as the data.tar support in general is so poor [0]
and at least something like linux-source-3.11 uses the uncompressed
tar.gz trick it would seems like a disservice to change it now.

But I do think those .deb packages are bogus, and they break the
assumption that .deb packages can be handled (w/o hacks) by standard
Unix tools (in this case gzip needs a --force option to comply with
the request). Sorry, should have updated my comment on the bug report
clarifying that.

The danger is that not fixing it, means tools might start supporting
the bogusly created packages, but those have existed for a long time
already, so they might need to anyway… Has someone tried recompressing
linux-source-3.11 with something like -Zgzip -z1 as proposed in that
bug report to see how it turns out (space and time-wise), if that
happened to be acceptable, I'd happily push the fix for dpkg 1.17.4.

[0] <https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/DebSupport>, created after
    this was spotted, I'd need to update it now probably.

Thanks,
Guillem