[tryton-debian] tarball compression

[Mathias Behrle]

* Raphael Hertzog: " Re: [tryton-debian] tarball compression" (Mon, 27 Jan 2014
  23:16:05 +0100):

> 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. 

Yes. But who uses it for what purpose? As soon as the upstream tarball is in
pristine-tar, this is the relevant source. Does anyone control the source
tarballs of all those dfsg packages?

> Gratuitous divergence is frowned upon.

Understood.
 
> > > - 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.

For me a 30-50% faster upload is a significant difference with my small
upload. dpkg now using xz as default will have its rationales, too. Having
orig.tar.gz and debian.tar.xz for me is just ugly and inconsequent.

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

Upstream uses python standards and setuptools misses this feature. 
 
> I'm not going to reject packages because they are recompressed, but I
> would suggest you to not continue doing that.

I will revert the changes introduced by Daniel and use gz tarballs. I am tired
of this discussion and it takes too much of my time.

-- 

    Mathias Behrle
    PGP/GnuPG key availabable from any keyserver, ID: 0x8405BBF6
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