Bug#688303: fails on concatenated bzip2 compressed Packages files (regression)
reassign 688303 bzip2 1.0.6-4
severity 688303 wishlist
retitle 688303 Please support concatenated bz2 files in zlib-functions
thanks
On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 11:28 AM, Thijs Kinkhorst <thijs@debian.org> wrote:
> The problem is that our APT archive contains a Packages.bz2 which is a
> concatenation of other bz2 files (of sub-archives). Two concatenated
> bzip2 files again form a valid bzip2 file. The b(un)zip2 command line
> utils support this and it's a documented feature.
It may be a documented feature of bzip2, but not of APT as you have noticed.
It is also not part of any documentation for a repository format, which all
say that the Packages.bz2 file is a compressed Packages file.
Nowhere is said that this could be a concatenation of different streams a
compression algorithm knows by accident how to combine into one file.
(It speaks volumes that the documentation of the higher level API mentions
indeed the method you point to, but in the example code showing writing and
reading a file on the very same page it is not used, nor even mentioned -
maybe because they also see a difference between file and stream)
Anyway, we don't even use the higher level functions, we use the zlib-
compatibility functions which do not expose this "detail", so I am
reassigning this to libbz2 for them to consider implementing support for
this one way or another.
Either way, it's a bug in your archive to assume that such bz2-files would
be supported by APT or anything else working with these indexes without it
ever be documented as supported.
The reference implementation for an archive are the ones operated by
ftp-masters - it is reasonable to assume everything they don't use is
not safe to use in yours.
Best regards
David Kalnischkies
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