udeb and data.tar.xz files?

["Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>]

I'm very confused about what the status is regarding udeb and
data.tar.xz.  Are they allowed or not?  It seems at the moment that
dh_builddeb is creating them by default, and lintian is complaining that
this is an error.

I've done a search through the web and debian-devel and it looks like
things are in transition.  That is, there are people hoping that the
udeb infrastruction will support xz compression, and even an assertion
that the lintian complaint is not obsolete and those references *appear*
newer than references to the udeb-uses-non-gzip-data-tarball error.

Or I could be conservative and hard code something explicit in
debian/rules to force dh_builddeb to pass -Zgzip to dpkg-deb, but that
will be ugly, and risks being obsolete at some point.

Can someone tell me what's up, and ideally update the text at:

	http://lintian.debian.org/tags/udeb-uses-non-gzip-data-tarball.html

... so developers can know what to do?

Many thanks,

						- Ted