Dear friends, I've been using xz compression for a long time, but I see a big defect which is today pushing me to turn it off for the .orig.tar file. The issue is that depending on the version of xz-utils, it produces a different output.
We use "git archive" within the PKG OpenStack team to generate this tarball (which is more or less the same as pristine-tar, except we use upstream tags rather than a pristine-tar branch). The fact that xz produces a different result makes it not reproducible. As a consequence, it is very hard for us to use this system across distributions (ie: use that in both Debian and Ubuntu, or in Sid & Jessie). We need consistency. As a friend puts it: "This is a fundamental problem/defect with xz. This (and a lot of other such defects, e.g. non-robustness of xz archives that easily lead to file corruption etc) are the reason that there is lzip (and which is why gnu.org has, on a technical basis, decided that lzip is official gzip-successor for gnu software releases when they come in tarballs). So it'd be super nice to have LZIP support in dpkg, and use that instead of xz, archive wide. Your thoughts everyone? Is there any reason why we wouldn't do that? Cheers, Thomas Goirand (zigo) -- 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/557be879.5060...@debian.org