On Sat, Nov 2, 2019 at 5:05 PM Neal Gompa ngompa13@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Nov 2, 2019 at 4:47 PM Nico Kadel-Garcia nkadel@gmail.com wrote:
Fedora 31 elected to use a new compression algorithm, "zstd", to compress RPM's. The result of this unnecessary optimization is that even commercially supported and long-term-support operating systems, like RHEL 7 and 8, and CentOS 7 and 8, cannot deconstruct leading edge Fedora SRPM's, especially the bleeding edge ones from rawhide.
This creates a real backporting problem for people like me who publish internal backports of leading edge components, or who try to publish backports from Fedora to EPEL. It breaks the "mock" toolkit for compiling RPMs under various new operating systems, and it breaks the bility to run "rpmbuild" on a Fedora 31 SRPM.
Whether I consider zstd to be an extraneous and entirely unnecessary optimization, it's in place. There are support problems of CentOS taking on supporting an enhanced RPM software to resolve this. Is there any interest in taking this on for centosplus?
Feel free to make a case for Red Hat to backport support for zstd to RHEL 7. They've done it in the past when Fedora introduced the switch to xz (RHEL didn't have it at the time either!). RPM in RHEL 8.2 will have zstd support. If you have a Red Hat customer account, feel free to make a case for it to be made available as a z-stream update to 8.1.
I'd be happy with having it in RHEL 8.2 and CentOS 8.2. I'm somewhat skeptical about a projected release date for this feature, since this would touch RPM, which is in the new and suppossedly hyperstable "BaseOS" channel.
I've tried to report it as a feature request with my Red Hat Linux Server license. As it seems to turn out, their main web page customer support page doesn't have any apparent links to to the Bugzilla, it just accepts described problems to try and guess, in this case irrelevantly, about what Wiki might have information. But the Bugzilla is still available, I submitted it at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1768147