Bug#39299: AMENDED PROPOSAL] Permit use of bz2 for source packages
Chris Lawrence <quango@watervalley.net> writes:
> On Oct 23, Raul Miller wrote:
> > The one issue I can see is existing support for source packages.
> >
> > We should not allow bz2 source packages into our archives until after
> > the source package tools have a good track record with transparently
> > supporting this format.
If all fails you allways unpack the source with "tar -xIvvf" and pacth
in the diff by hand and build the required source package
tools. To prevent even that one could say that packages needed to
build from source should remain gziped, which they would normaly,
since bzip2 compressed source would only be an option.
> Fair enough; probably what we need is:
>
> 1. dpkg-dev needs the bzip2 support folded in ASAP, ahead of the
> policy change, perhaps with a note that bz2 format is not to be
> used for "live" uploads until it is adopted in policy.
The current upload script will probably reject any non gzip sources at
the moment. That would assure that nobody does a wrong upload for the
time being.
In my opinion there should be only a few package that my not use bzip
for sources, namely everything thats needed to update to the new tools
via source, which would be covered by standard and bzip2 (which should
be standard if it isn't) I think.
> 2. We test the bzip2 support, perhaps uploading bz2 format files to
> experimental (?). We could also run some scripts on a local mirror
I don´ think thats neccessary. A few packages should be uploaded with
bzip2 support and if that works than everything is fine. There should
be at least one orig.tar.bz and one tar.bz2 file both with and without
diff.gz. That would be 4 packages and if they work theres no reason
why not all packages should work. After that test let every developer
decide themself if they want to use bzip2 compression.
> to do some regression testing (i.e. unpack gz source packages and
> repack with bz2 format).
I did some regression test nearly a year ago. bzip2 saves about 30%
compared to gzip on big files, which would be around 4 GB for the
debian mirror.
> 3. Once we're satisfied bzip2 archives are handled "correctly", update
> policy accordingly.
This I would rephrase to "Once we're satisfied that everyone has
updated his dpkg-source, i.e. can handle bzip2 compressed sources
(which would be the release after bzip2 support is in stable), we make
bzip2 compression the default.
> Sound fair enough?
May the Source be with you.
Goswin
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