Binary diffs for deb files

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 11:42:49PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> 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.

Isn't the output of zlib being piped into tar?  Seems like the same delicate
moments would apply to both.

-- 
 - mdz