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

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org>]

On Fri, May 10 2019, Ian Jackson wrote:

>> On my embedded systems, I don't have ar installed, only tar.
>> I assume, that dpkg speaks ar natively?
>
> dpkg-deb has a built-in decoder for the subset of ar that is used for
> deb(5).  One reason I chose ar rather than tar is that handwriting a
> decoder for ar was much simpler than for tar.

Plus, of course, when discussing tar, there is always the "which tar
format do you mean?" question.

https://manpages.debian.org/stretch/libarchive-dev/tar.5.en.html

I should note that dpkg does have a maximum file size limit that's
rather lower than the ar limit, due to its interpretation of tar
headers.  I believe I filed a bug on this but I'm not able to find it
right now, unfortunately.

John