Installation fails for Heroku 7.68.0 on Debian 11 (stable)

[chetgray]

What is the current behavior?

$ sudo apt install heroku
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
  heroku
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
0 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0 B/30.5 MB of archives.
After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used.
Retrieving bug reports... Done
Parsing Found/Fixed information... Done
dpkg-deb: error: archive '/var/cache/apt/archives/heroku_7.68.0-1_amd64.deb' uses unknown compression for
 member 'control.tar.zst', giving up
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/share/apt-listchanges/DebianFiles.py", line 124, in readdeb
    output = subprocess.check_output(command)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/subprocess.py", line 424, in check_output
    return run(*popenargs, stdout=PIPE, timeout=timeout, check=True,
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/subprocess.py", line 528, in run
    raise CalledProcessError(retcode, process.args,
subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command '['dpkg-deb', '-f', '/var/cache/apt/archives/heroku_7.68.0-1_amd64.deb',
 'Package', 'Source', 'Version', 'Architecture', 'Status']' returned non-zero exit status 2.

The above exception was the direct cause of the following exception:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/apt-listchanges", line 323, in <module>
    main(config)
  File "/usr/bin/apt-listchanges", line 104, in main
    pkg = DebianFiles.Package(deb)
  File "/usr/share/apt-listchanges/DebianFiles.py", line 358, in __init__
    parser.readdeb(self.path)
  File "/usr/share/apt-listchanges/DebianFiles.py", line 127, in readdeb
    raise RuntimeError(_("Error processing '%(what)s': %(errmsg)s") %
RuntimeError: Error processing '/var/cache/apt/archives/heroku_7.68.0-1_amd64.deb': Command '['dpkg-deb', '-f',
 '/var/cache/apt/archives/heroku_7.68.0-1_amd64.deb', 'Package', 'Source', 'Version', 'Architecture',
 'Status']' returned non-zero exit status 2.
dpkg-deb: error: archive '/var/cache/apt/archives/heroku_7.68.0-1_amd64.deb' uses unknown compression for
 member 'control.tar.zst', giving up
dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/heroku_7.68.0-1_amd64.deb (--unpack):
 dpkg-deb --control subprocess returned error exit status 2
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/heroku_7.68.0-1_amd64.deb
needrestart is being skipped since dpkg has failed
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

What is the expected behavior?

The Heroku .deb would be decompressed and installed.

---

Debian 11.6 "bullseye" (current stable release) includes dpkg 1.20.12, which does not know how to decompress Zstandard (zstd) format. That functionality was added in dpkg 1.21.18, and while Debian testing "bookworm" has included that version and beyond, it is built with a later version of libc6 than is compatible with that on bullseye, and to install on a bullseye system would require replacing a ton of packages with those from "bookworm", which is untenable.

[k80bowman]

Thank you for letting us know. We'll look into it.

[chetgray]

This is almost a duplicate of #2213 , but the author closed that issue as completed when they found a workaround by using a later version of Ubuntu.

[colindean]

I'm impacted by this and decided to go down the rabbit hole with some time available to me.

TL;DR it looks like oclif needs to allow the user to configure the compression type, per this S.O. thread.

Research:

The deb is packed in GHA:

cli/.github/workflows/ci.yml

Lines 68 to 69 in 9aa4339

	- name: Building deb
	run: ./scripts/pack/deb

Which eventually calls oclif-dev pack:deb here:

cli/scripts/pack/deb

Lines 11 to 14 in 9aa4339

	await execa('./node_modules/.bin/oclif-dev', ['pack:deb'], {
	cwd: CLI_ROOT,
	stdio: 'inherit'
	})

oclif works its packing magic in src/commands/pack/deb.ts, but mostly just writes a bunch of files before invoking dpkg --build.

Through some searching on DDG, I eventually found this S.O. Q/A that indicates that oclif needs to allow the user to specify it in the debian/rules file:

override_dh_builddeb:
    dh_builddeb -- -Zxz

or to pass -Zxz, as alluded by this output on Debian 11.6:

$ dpkg-deb --help
...
  -Z<type>                         Set the compression type used when building.
                                     Allowed types: gzip, xz, none.
...

However, there's a lot of code stuff to test and change there. Perhaps the shortest solution is to use ubuntu-20.04 as the GitHub Actions runner for the pack job instead of ubuntu-latest, which appears to now be 22.04, which I speculate uses zstd by default for compression of debs.

[k80bowman]

Closing since we are on version 8.9.0. If this is still happening, please feel free to reopen.