Hello zstd compressed .debs in Ubuntu!

When Julian Andres Klode and I added initial Zstandard compression support to Ubuntu’s APT and dpkg in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS we planned getting the changes accepted to Debian quickly and making Ubuntu 18.10 the first release where the new compression could speed up package installations and upgrades. Well, it took slightly longer than that.

Since then many other packages have been updated to support zstd compressed packages and read-only compression has been back-ported to the 16.04 Xenial LTS release, too, on Ubuntu’s side. In Debian, zstd support is available now in APT, debootstrap and reprepro (thanks Dimitri!). It is still under review for inclusion in Debian’s dpkg (BTS bug 892664).

Given that there is sufficient archive-wide support for zstd, Ubuntu is switching to zstd compressed packages in Ubuntu 21.10, the current development release. Please welcome hello/2.10-2ubuntu3, the first zstd-compressed Ubuntu package that will be followed by many other built with dpkg (>= 1.20.9ubuntu2), and enjoy the speed!

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