Re: Potato now stable

[Drake Diedrich <Drake.Diedrich@anu.edu.au>]

On Mon, Aug 14, 2000 at 11:08:59PM -0700, Joey Hess wrote:
> 
> Perhaps these sub-packages would be additional files in the ar file.
> Perhaps those files themselves should be in .deb format? Then we have
> sub package nesting and meta-data too....
> 
> > Of course this is all just off hand... :>
> 
> Same.

   Irix does that with it's packages: multiple micropackages in one file.
Actually, you can also get jumbo packages, just tarballs ("tardist") with
lots of packages inside them, each package with lots of micropackages.
   Beyond the modifications to the .deb format we'd also need to modify the
way dpkg stores package information.  ls /var/lib/dpkg/info just took 30
seconds on my machine.  Each package has several files in there.  At 4K
and 1 inode apiece, the dpkg overhead is even higher than the overhead for
microdebs all in separate files.
    Tasks wouldn't be well served by jumbo packages - there'd still have to
be some support for a hierarchy beyond the .deb layer, so the hierarchy
support should probably not be related to the actual file handling at all.
Maybe .debs could simply contain other, simpler .debs.  That should be
fairly easy to unpack with existing dpkg functions (whatever extracts
streams from the ar format), and would allow an infinitely deep and
arbitrarily broken-into-separate-files division.  Signed .debs are probably
an issue.

-Drake