Compressing packages with bzip2 instead gzip?

[John C. McCabe-Dansted]

On Wednesday 04 January 2006 16:40, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> However, we don't currently have support for 7zip in .debs, so among the
> available compression methods, bzip2 seems to outperform gzip on the
> language packs.

If we are going to be upgrading dpkg so that it handles new compression 
formats, could we also change the way the dpkg utils compress data.tar and 
control.tar so that it uses an official and documented version for each 
compression utility it uses. 

For example, could the new dpkg utilities generate all data.tar.gz files be 
using the command:
	gzip-1.3.5 --best -N < data.tar > data.tar.gz

Apart from saving ~1Kb per deb file, this would also make it *much* easier to 
do tricks like Deb-diffs.

Perhaps the new Debian version number could be a x.y.z number where z is only 
used by patch utilities that need to know exactly how to regenerate a deb 
file with the same md5sum?

-- 
John C. McCabe-Dansted
Masters Student