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

[Ansgar <ansgar@debian.org>]

On Fri, 2019-05-10 at 11:04 +0200, Thomas Goirand wrote:
> On 5/9/19 6:25 PM, Andrej Shadura wrote:
> > How about the format opkg used for some time, which is a .deb file
> > but
> > with tar as the outer container format instead of ar?
> 
> This is a very bad idea. When installing a large amount of packages,
> apt
> needs to uncompress all control.tar.gz files so it can get the config
> and templates of debconf. With tar, meaning without an index, one may
> need to uncompress the whole of the .deb file in order to extract
> just a
> tiny portion of it. This could potentially be super long (think: a
> dist-upgrade with so many packages...).

The outer container would probably be uncompressed; as it has only very
few members (dummy file, control.tar.*, data.tar.*, ${something-new}),
accessing any of these few members is fast (as you can just seek from
one header to the next and only need to do so few times).

Ansgar