Bug#161593: apt-utils: apt-ftparchive fumbles on signed debs

[Adam Heath <doogie@debian.org>]

clone 161593 -1
reassign -1 debsigs
thanks

On Fri, 20 Sep 2002, Randolph Chung wrote:

> so i guess we should reassign this to debsigs.

No, both are incorrect.

apt-ftparchive needs to handle the format.  And debsigs needs to produce the
debs correctly.

Here is what conclusion Jason and I agreed upon:

For official deb extractors:

  * Must support both bsd and sysv style ar formats.
  * debian-binary must always be first.
  * For < deb format 3.0, the first three members, in order, are:
    debian-binary, control, data.  Anything else is an error.
  * For >= deb format 3.0, the first member is debian-binary.  All other
    members can be in any order.

For official deb creators:

  * must create archive in bsd format
  * debian-binary must always be first.
  * The order of the members is: debian-binary, control, data.
  * Optional members follow the required members, and are prefixed with '_'.

Deb format 3.0 introduces several new features.

  * The control member will always be control.tar.gz.
  * The data member can have different compression formats, based on the
    extension after the tar.  The current supported list is:

    .gz		gzip
    .bz2	bzip2
    <empty>	no compression

Additionally, there is no long name support.  BSD and SysV are radically
different, so we decided not to support it at all.

The format of the embedded tar has not been decided upon.  dpkg has
traditionally used gnu(as it has no limit on name length or link length), but
this has not been enforced.  I've been thinking of modifying
dpkg-deb/extract.c to support posix long names(just for the hell of it).

I shall be typing up something more official, and better written, soon.