Hi! I had noticed this a while ago while reading changelogs, but didn't realize at the time this poses actual problems, besides being possibly just a dubious practice.
There seems to be some packages overriding the default compression level for xz to 9. This means dpkg-deb will require way more memory on both compression and decompression usually for extremely little gain, and might even fail on some systems with low memory (see #757740 for an example). But the real issue is that (as mentioned on the xz man page), using such high levels might actually make no sense at all when being using with data that is smaller than the dictionary size. From doing a quick search on <http://codesearch.debian.net/> for “dpkg-deb.*-z9” and “dh_builddeb.*-z9”, but w/o looking in detail, it seems that most packages are or have been maintained by Daniel Baumann or the Fonts Team (both CCed). Was there an actual reason to use -z9, beside maybe trying to get the “bestest” compression possible? :) This could be checked from lintian by using something like: $ ar x pkg.deb data.tar.xz $ xz --list --verbose --verbose --robot data.tar.xz and comparing the file sizes with the dictionary size used. I'll be filing a bug report about this. Thanks, Guillem -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20140901122030.ga25...@gaara.hadrons.org