Compressed apt index files by default for 18.04?

[Julian Andres Klode]

On Sun, Sep 10, 2017 at 10:32:37AM +0100, Robie Basak wrote:
> Hi Julian,
> 
> On Sat, Sep 09, 2017 at 04:41:27PM +0200, Julian Andres Klode wrote:
> > I'd like us to try out using LZ4 compressed index files in
> > /var/lib/apt/lists for 18.04, starting from the beginning
> > of the development period with apt 1.6~alpha1 (ASAP). 
> 
> Thank you for driving this!
> 
> What would be our options if were to find issues later such that we
> concluded that we want to revert this change after release? Would it be
> a simple flip back of the default in an SRU, or would it be more
> complicated?

We can switch the default of acquire::gzipIndexes back to false. This
won't automatically convert all stuff back however, only when it fetches
updated indexes will the files be decompressed.

> 
> As you point out there are many components that make assumptions about
> /var/lib/apt/lists/, and I'm also thinking about software that isn't in
> the archive, such as commonly used deployment and management tools used
> in the wild directly from upstreams in the server space. That makes me a
> little uneasy about doing it in an LTS cycle. But only a little, and I
> expect I'd be happy if mitigations are considered.

That's probably true. I should mention that Docker images for both
Debian and Ubuntu already default to compressed indexes since quite
some time (forever?), so a lot of problems are probably fixed already.

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