Package splitting and MSDOS names conversion

[Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk>]

There is a lot of stuff being posted here, and I can't answer all of
it.  However, I will say the following:

I have no intention of not supporting floppy-based installation, and
the question is not whether we keep the msdos tree or not.  (The msdos
tree is also required for people using an intermediate system with
short filenames.)

If the packages in the main tree are split they will be named
     <package>-<version>.<n>of<m>.deb
and you can install them with dpkg -i *.deb using current versions of
dpkg.

Asking users to split the files themselves is not an option, because
(a) they will probably not have any decent file-splitting tools, (b)
we don't know what system they might be having to use to access the
Internet and (c) this doesn't help at all the problem of FTPing large
files around.

The discussion is close to persuading me that we should split the
files in the binary tree too.

Ian.