Re: RFC: Support for zstd in .deb packages?

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

On Sat, 2018-04-28 at 19:44:08 +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 27, 2018 at 07:02:12AM +0200, Guillem Jover wrote:
> >...
> > As a replacement for gzip, it would
> > definitely make sense, but otherwise I'm not sure I see it.
> 
> The number of packages that use gzip as compressor if rebuilt should be 
> pretty close to 0. We need gzip for compatibility with older packages,
> but no replacement for it.

I know, I meant this in the sense that if we wanted and could replace
gzip with something better, going with zstd might be the obvious
option. But given that we are stuck with having to support gzip
anyway…

> > An area where there's still room for improvement with xz f.ex. when it
> > comes to decompression speed, is lack of multi-threaded support, as
> > liblzma currently only supports it for compression.
> 
> This sounds like a much less invasive change to me.
> And it could already deliver benefits for buster if
> someone would be willing to implement that.

Something else I just noticed yesterday is speed-up improvements in zlib:

  https://bugs.debian.or/763982
  https://github.com/jtkukunas/zlib
  https://github.com/Dead2/zlib-ng/
  https://github.com/gildor2/fast_zlib
  https://github.com/madler/zlib/issues/216
  https://github.com/madler/zlib/issues/231
  https://github.com/madler/zlib/issues/346
  https://github.com/madler/zlib/pull/251
  https://github.com/madler/zlib/pull/335
  https://github.com/madler/zlib/pull/345

Thanks,
Guillem