Removing bzip2 support from apt due to rustification

To: deity@lists.debian.org

Cc: debian-devel@lists.debian.org

Subject: Removing bzip2 support from apt due to rustification

From: Julian Andres Klode <jak@debian.org>

Date: Thu, 6 Jun 2019 23:35:28 +0200

Message-id: <[🔎] 20190606232729.GA11050@debian.org>

Mail-followup-to: deity@lists.debian.org, debian-devel@lists.debian.org

Hi folks, seeing that Federico Mena Quintero has taken over bzip2 development and is in the process of porting it to Rust[1], we should consider removing bzip2 support from apt, dpkg, etc. following the release of buster. My understanding is that having APT depend on a library written in Rust severily hurts its portability, and makes it hard to support for stable releases, as Rust is a fairly fast moving target. I do not believe that bzip2 is a useful algorithm in todays world, and we should look at migrating any remaining bzip2-only things (translation files I think) to xz or zstd. Thanks, Julian [1] https://people.gnome.org/~federico/blog/maintaining-bzip2.html -- debian developer - deb.li/jak | jak-linux.org - free software dev ubuntu core developer i speak de, en