Compressing packages with bzip2 instead gzip?

[Phillip Susi]

I believe it already does do gzip -9.  How would this make "tricks like 
debdiff" easier?

John C. McCabe-Dansted wrote:
> 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?
>