[tryton-debian] tarball compression

[Raphael Hertzog]

Hi,

I just wanted to react to this old mail.

On Sat, 25 Jan 2014, Mathias Behrle wrote:
> > Reading back and forth Debian policy I couldn't find any reference to the
> > compression of the orig tarballs. Perhaps you could point me in the right
> > direction, if I missed something.
> > 
> > The only reference I found to this subject is in the Debian Developers
> > Reference [1], which contains explicitely 'shoulds', but not 'musts'.

It's certainly not an obligation but I also don't see a good reason to go
out of your way to recompress the upstream tarballs. I routinely use
"git-import-orig --uscan" and this fetches the pristine upstream tarball
withour recompressing it on the fly.

> > integrity of the remote source tarball. The source for packaging is the one
> > provided by the pristine-tar branch, and nothing else. And this one must be
> > byte-to-byte identical to the one uploaded to the archive.

Right, but it's also good when the orig.tar uploaded to Debian matches the
upstream provided file. The upstream file might have a signature and it's
then possible to quickly verify that Debian used the upstream provided
file. Gratuitous divergence is frowned upon.

> > - Advantage of reducing bandwidth by compressing to a state-of-the-art
> >   compression

If this made a significant difference, it would be justifiable. But for
small packages like the tryton-* packages, I don't think it's worth it.

If you really care about this, you'd better convince upstream to provide
xz tarballs.

I'm not going to reject packages because they are recompressed, but I
would suggest you to not continue doing that.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer

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