Package: debian-policy Version: 3.1.1.1 Severity: wishlist I propose that "woody" and subsequent releases permit the use of bzip2 format for source packages. Code to handle bzip2-compressed source packages has been integrated into an experimental release of dpkg, and could easily be ported to the current mainline dpkg. The patches allow automatic detection of the format on extraction (dpkg-source -x); building of source packages requires an additional argument to dpkg-source, dpkg-buildpackage or debuild, as appropriate.
As a technical matter, bzip2-compressed source packages have extension "tar.bz2" and are, when uncompressed, should have an identical file structure to a gzip-compressed package. (This proposal replaces #39299 and is an amended version thereof.) I can't find any section of the policy document that deals with the specifics of the soruce package format. It may be sufficient to add a section stating: Source packages may be compressed either using gzip or bzip2. For more information, refer to the documentation for the dpkg-dev package; in particular, the manual page for the dpkg-source command. -- System Information Debian Release: potato Architecture: i386 Kernel: Linux quango4 2.3.33 #1 Sun Dec 19 13:52:36 CST 1999 i686
