Re: Size matters. Debian binary package stats
Olaf van der Spek <olafvdspek@gmail.com> writes:
> On 12/18/05, Steinar H. Gunderson <sgunderson@bigfoot.com> wrote:
>> On Sun, Dec 18, 2005 at 02:56:10PM +0100, Olaf van der Spek wrote:
>> > Why would this be huge?
>> > Why is it that hard to plugin another codec?
>>
>> You'd have to rewrite about every single tool in the world handling .debs,
>> make up a transition plan and upgrade from that. Not to mention that you'd
>
> Why is the knowledge of how to decode a .deb distributed over so many tools?
>
>> have to make sure it works on all kinds of obscure platforms actually using
>> the thing. (And yes, I have used ar and tar to extract debs, and consider it
>> a quite useful feature.)
>
> Why would that stop working if you switch compression schemes?
> I guess tar is coded to use gzip with -z and bzip2 with -j, but why is
> there no generic way to add coders/decoders (codecs) to tar (and other
> applications that wish to use compression filters)?
uncompressor <file.tar.whatever | tar -x
>> The .deb format is _fixed_ -- this isn't AVI where you just "plug in another
>> codec" and hope it works.
MfG
Goswin
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