Chris Lawrence writes ("Bug#54002: [PROPOSAL] permit use of bzip2 for source
packages"):
> 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.
This should not be a policy proposal yet, I think. Instead, get the
code into the distributed version of dpkg-dev for a year or so and
then we can think about changing it.
I think it's important that people with old versions of dpkg-dev can
still unpack new source archives for at least some time.
Furthermore, to avoid changing source archive checksums we should only
distribute .bz2 when the upstreams do so, or when the upstream ships
something we have to repack anyway.
Ian.
