Re: .deb format: let's use 0.939, zstd, drop bzip2

[Ansgar <ansgar@debian.org>]

Jeremy Stanley writes:
> On 2019-05-08 22:35:58 +0200 (+0200), Ansgar wrote:
>> Switching to a different binary format will break various tools.  If we
>> want to do this, I wonder if we shouldn't take the chance to move away
>> from tar?
>> 
>> We have various applications that only want to extract single members of
>> the package (changelog, NEWS, copyright, ...); tar is a really bad
>> format for such an operation.  Other formats (zip, 7z, ...) are more
>> suited for them.
>
> Are you talking about source packages or binary packages here? The
> latter use ar, not tar.

I'm talking about binary packages (*.deb).  They currently use tar
archives (control.tar.*, data.tar.*) packed in an ar archive.

Ansgar