handle 'large tarball' source packages
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ubuntu Distributed Development |
Confirmed
|
Low
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
Example package: chromium-browser
Some source packages aren't a source tree at all. But a tarball that has build steps that first unpack it. One example is the chromium-browser source package. It is a large tar.lzma with a Build-Depends on lzma. My guess is this is working around Debian guides that say you must be in .gz or .bz2 format.
However, this means that the package importer ends up trying to version 100 snapshots of a .lzma file, rather than the source tree.
This is non optimal for lots of reasons. (If you want to hack on the packaging for this, you don't want to be trying to hack on a .lzma file, etc.)
One option is to just treat this as a bug in the upstream packaging, and ask them to fix it back to a regular source package.
A possible option is to teach the package importer how to detect this sort of thing, and unpack it ourselves. If we just want to have something which can be compressed, we could decompress the .lzma file, and then we would have a giant tarball that would at least compress well.
