Forcing gzip compression when building Debian packages
If you're building packages on a recent Debian-based distribution and are getting
when trying to install the package on an old system with dpkg version < 1.15.6, you can force the usage of the gzip compression algorithm by changing the dh_builddeb in debian/rules to:
dh_builddeb -- -Z gzip
If you do not have an old-style debian/rules files where all the dh_* calls are listed but only one generic stanza like
%: dh $@
then you can add
override_dh_builddeb: dh_builddeb -- -Zgzip
below that to set the option for dh_builddeb.