Binary diffs for deb files

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 03:26:13PM -0700, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 11:10:08PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> > dpkg-deb uses zlib for compression, not gzip. Last time I talked to
> > Scott about this, I seem to remember that he said that it was
> > non-trivial to enable rsyncability because the gzip --rsyncable patch
> > was done in gzip rather than in zlib, and would require some moderately
> > complex porting work.
> 
> Good point; it wouldn't quite be trivial.  We could recompress the debs
> using gzip after the build, I suppose, but is there any particular reason
> why dpkg needs to use zlib?  It already relies on external tools of similar
> ubiquity (e.g., GNU tar), and forking gzip is typically faster on
> multiprocessor machines like our buildds.

It makes sense for it to use zlib for decompression to avoid external
dependencies at delicate moments. I'm not sure why it's important to do
so for compression too, though; I can only assume that it was for
symmetry.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]