Re: Re: OT Re: Advantage of debs?
On Sat, Jan 08, 2000 at 04:28:23PM +1100, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 03, 2000 at 01:53:21PM -0500, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > Yes, compressed tarballs tend to yield better overall compression, but that's
> > not the only reason for choosing an archive format. The zip format has a
> > central directory that allows any file in the archive to be extracted without
> > decompressing the entire archive. This is not true of compressed tarballs.
>
> That's true -- but is this useful in a package format? Not in my opinion.
If you wanted to, say, extract only the control files and not the rest of the
package, or generate a list of the files in a package, I could see how this
would be useful, especially when batch processing a large number of packages.
I don't think that the advantages of the ZIP format are very important for
Debian, currently, but there are advantages, and they could prove more useful
in the future.
--
- mdz
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