Re: patch PR25583: debuginfod bsdtar for deb

[Mark Wielaard <mark@klomp.org>]

Hi Frank,

On Wed, 2020-03-25 at 10:57 -0400, Frank Ch. Eigler via Elfutils-devel wrote:
> Author: Frank Ch. Eigler <fche@redhat.com>
> Date:   Wed Mar 25 10:55:53 2020 -0400
> 
>     PR25583: debuginfod: prefer bsdtar to dpkg for .deb handling
>     
>     It turns out a bsdtar subshell can do the job of dpkg-deb.
>     bsdtar comes from/with libarchive so it should be available
>     everywhere.

The patch itself looks correct. And it is a win for non-deb based
systems since the bsdtar dependencies are already there. But for .deb
based systems it is more likely they already have dpkg installed, while
bsdtar might be a separate install/package. And it still needs to spawn
an external process.

I looked at the buildbot workers and none had bsdtar installed. I have
installed it now on the i386, debian/fedora/centos-x86_64, arm32 and
arm64 workers and have requested it to be installed on the s390x and
ppc64[le] workers.

I am not against this patch, but I do wonder if it should not try to
fall back on dpkg if bsdtar isn't installed.

Cheers,

Mark