* Christoph Biedl <debian.axhn@manchmal.in-ulm.de>, 2016-06-30, 22:56:
So we would only bother people who overrode the defaultadd: In an unreasonable way.
Right.
However I'm undecided now how to deal with that. Using lintian, actually promoted by the developer's reference 7.1.1, is somewhat late in the chain. It was way better if dpkg-deb could automatically decide upon an optimal compression value. After a quick glance into the sources this seems possible but not very nice to do. Afterwards, dpkg-deb could discourage setting the compression level manually, and lintian could enforce that.
"Optimal" is subjective.It makes sense for dpkg to use lower compression level than the user requested when the tarball is small.
But I don't think dpkg should use anything beyond -6 just because the tarball is big. Higher compression levels should be used only when explicitly requested by user, because their costs are non-negligible and their benefits are greatly variable.
-- Jakub Wilk