Package: apt-utils Severity: wishlist I have recently added support to dpkg-dev 1.11, for configuable compression types of the data member in debs. I encode the type in the deb by way of changing the extension of the filename.
The types I support are gzip(default), bzip2, and stored. Their extensions are .gz, .bz2, and nothing(ie, data.tar). There is code in dpkg HEAD that can link to libz and libbz2 statically or dynamically, or call external gzip/bzip2 binaries. apt-ftparchive should probably do something similiar.
