Bug#39299: PROPOSAL] permit/require use of bz2 for source packages

[Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>]

Branden Robinson wrote:
> Even gzip does not compress deterministically.  I learned this when fooling
> with the massive X source archives.  I can take the same damn .tar file,
> gzip -9 it on different machines, and get different results.  They're not
> different by much, say 14 bytes or so, but it is a difference.

That's various timestamps.

joey@kite:~>file foo.gz 
foo.gz: gzip compressed data, deflated, original filename, last modified:
Thu Jun 10 18:58:35 1999, max compression, os: Unix

File wouldn't know when it was compressed w/o them (it's _not_ looking at
mtime). Trick gzip into thinking it's the same time when compressing it
again and I think you'll get an identical file.

-- 
see shy jo