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
