Tarball inside tarball

[James Westby]

Hi,

Sorry for the delay in responding to this.

On Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:02:18 +0000, Dmitrijs Ledkovs <dmitrij.ledkov at gmail.com> wrote:
> Main is still using https://code.edge.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-dev for
> their packaging. And that's ok until we iron out all Documentation &
> Infrastructure bugs.
> 
> But some lp:ubuntu/package branches are pure evil =)
> 
> For example https://code.edge.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-branches/ubuntu/lucid/xulrunner-1.9.1/lucid
> is useless for UDD.
> 
> It uses tarball-inside tarball packaging hence the branch is HUGE in
> size and useless for using bzr for example to patch it. This is
> probably a bad example of a package because it is managed as part of
> the ~ubuntu-dev branches in merge mode. But this probably affects a
> few package branches.

Yes, they aren't great for using bzr.

> Will it be possible to identify all of these packages and file bugs
> against them in Ubuntu/Debian (Priority Wishlist?) and make a switch
> to more regular layout?

I can't think of a better way than iterating over all packages and using
a heuristic, can you?

> These requests will be somewhat blocked by the dpkg source 3.0
> transition (support for bz2 compression) & the bzr-bd support for
> those source formats.

Indeed.

The latter should be about solved now.

I have heard other reasons given for using tarball-in-tarball than just
compression, but I don't think it's a good long-term strategy.

Thanks,

James