this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
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Not really. If xz were the issue, Debian would have just switched to a different tarball format like lz4.
This is more about Debian packaging conventions being very archaic and requiring a lot of futzing with upstream tarballs and patches.
The backdoor of the xz utils program(s) was in the tarball release, but not the main source code:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor
If debian had dodged the upstream tarball, then they wouldn't have been affected by this.
I mean, that's true, but that doesn't mean that's why Debian's doing it.
If they were solving just that, then they would have just pushed for something like a reproducible tarball where you can point to a commit, branch, tag, etcetera from which that tarball can be reproduced and not bother migrating their package format.
Debian has a serious ease-of-packaging issue that I've witnessed first-hand, and I think they've made it clear that it's moreso the ease factor they're focused on that the security factor.