On Tue, 2019-06-25 at 07:16 -0400, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
On Wed, Jun 19, 2019 at 9:31 AM Panu Matilainen
<pmatilai(a)redhat.com>
wrote:
> On 6/19/19 1:51 PM, Aleš Matěj wrote:
> > > At this point, the drpm library is the only blocker for zstd
> > > payloads,
> > > since createrepo_c needs to be able to handle zstd drpms.
> >
> > I looked into the drpm library and I should be able to add the
> > zstd support
> > (and make sure it works with createrepo_c)
> >
> > Working on it now.
>
> FWIW, as drpm links to librpm anyway, it should be possible for
> drpm to
> just use the file API from rpm to gain support for everything that
> rpm
> does instead of duplicating the effort for all the compression
> types.
>
> If there's something broken or missing that prevents this from
> working,
> we could always address that...
>
> - Panu -
This whole zstd replacement seems like a hazardous idea, because of
backporting SRPMs to older operating systems for EPEL compilation.
It's possible, but awkward, to chew through the git repos to deduce
whch git branch was used and reference that, rather than directly
extract from the SRPM. It would mean that unless this compression is
only applied to limited uses such as drpm, then older OS releases
would not be able to read the modern SRPM by default. Backwards
compatibility is not why people write new software, but broad
accessibility of the source code seems a vital feature to preserve
for
what should be rock stable build environments downstream.
I, for one, have done considerable backporting of Fedora SRPMs of
python modules to RHEL and CentOS environments. I'd hate to add
another step to extract them on RHEL or CentOS or to build from them
in "mock". I'd also hate for "rpm2cpio" to break: I hope adding
zstd
compatibility to the older versions of that tool, as well, is not
difficult.
This is change is strictly only about binary rpm payload compression
method change not at all about SRPMs.
--
Tomáš Mráz
No matter how far down the wrong road you've gone, turn back.
Turkish proverb
[You'll know whether the road is wrong if you carefully listen to your
conscience.]