On Tue, 2 Sep 2014, Ondřej Surý wrote: > On Tue, Sep 2, 2014, at 10:24, Marco d'Itri wrote: > > I know, but if systems on which xz-utils is not easily available really > > exist then the interested parties could replace it with xzdec which is > > small and statically linked. > > Is there such system or are we having an academic debate again?
xz-utils are not very portable to old/weird systems. I could imagine someone wanting to run debootstrap, which can IIRC work with just sh and ar and tar, on FreeMiNT on an Atari. But even there, the recommended method of installing Debian/m68k is currently to start from either a tarball or an ext2fs filesystem image one can dd(1) to the HDD (I even took care to generate it on MirBSD using ext2fs revision 0 and no new features¹, so that other OSes with extremely basic ext2fs support can read/write it, prior to rebooting into it). Only problem with that is kernel modules (if needed, one can always crosscompile a custom initial kernel, though). But I’m sure the m68k porters will want to work on getting d-i back, anyway. So, I’d say that restricting the base system to gzip is no longer necessary for jessie. (Even though the idea to build a statically linked xzdec for the host OS is hard, e.g. where to find a libc that works with its old kernel in the Linux case, etc.) But do make sure to keep it to xz -6, at worst -7, never -9. ① Apparently, modern Linux kernels do not manage to leave the filesystem alone in those cases, and always introduce features that some old OSes don’t support. bye, //mirabilos -- [16:04:33] bkix: "veni vidi violini" [16:04:45] bkix: "ich kam, sah und vergeigte"... -- 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/alpine.deb.2.11.1409021317420.22...@tglase.lan.tarent.de