@hj@icedquinn I use bzip2 a lot — it takes me more time to recall whether xz is uppercase J or is it Z 😂 XZ offers superior compression, but it's also significantly more resource-hungry — this isn't what I'd use on an old ARM machine with half a gig of RAM.
@mia@movsw.0x0.st@icedquinn@blob.cat my bad, that was an unfinished thought. from the current dpkg-deb manpage, the utility that glues a package together:
``` -Zcompress-type Specify which compression type to use when building a package. Allowed values are gzip, xz (since dpkg 1.15.6), zstd (since dpkg 1.19.0.5ubuntu2) and none (default is zstd). ``` they are cpio archives with any of the above compression, and the archive itself can ofc contain whatever pre-compressed files you desire.
in the Pentium II days, debian did skip over bzip2 for packages and it was due to the extreme memory requirements it demanded when the decision was made. anyone with less than ~64MB of RAM wouldn't have been able to install it, which would have excluded a huge chunk of hobbyists at the time.
by the time they got around to considering adding bzip2, xz had come along and was better in every way.
off topic, but, i'd like to see them add parallel decompression in dpkg-deb 👉👈
@mia@movsw.0x0.st@icedquinn@blob.cat i routinely run in to the problem a package manager trying to restart a service that 1: doesn't need to be restarted and 2: refuses to come back up cleanly because the other packages it depends on hasn't been updated yet.
find me a package manager that solve that and i'll switch immediately. hell, i'll join the dev team.
@purple@icedquinn there are some cases where restarts can fail but ime it's always a packaging issue
restarts can also be disabled with a global setting but that's opensuse-specific. zypper/libzypp can show processes that are still using outdated libraries plus their systemd units as well. I'm using its python module in a script that does some extra work and selective restarts on my system