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

[Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org>]

>>>>> "Michael" == Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> writes:

    Michael> On Fri, May 10, 2019 at 05:18:18AM +0200, Guillem Jover wrote:
    >> be updated anyway to support any new format. It also destroys
    >> some of the nice properties of the 2.x format, namely:
    >> 
    >> - Not requiring special tools to build/extract.

    Michael> This is really not a property worth preserving. I think it
    Michael> would be fairly easy to get significant performance
    Michael> improvements if we dropped the archive nesting, and all it
    Michael> would cost is losing a bullet point that nobody really
    Michael> cares about all that much. I remember when this was one of
    Michael> the "reasons" to advocate .deb over .rpm but in the real
    Michael> world people just apt install rpm and the anecdotes about
    Michael> this one time somebody wanted to unpack a deb on an ancient
    Michael> sunos box aren't worth slowing down every install until the
    Michael> end of time.

I've certainly heard people describe our use of both ar and tar as an
architectural minus especially on embedded platforms just because the
dependency set of dpkg needed to be larger.

I don't know how big of a concern that still is, but it does seem
strange to use multiple different archiving technologies in the same
format today.