Re: .deb format: let's use 0.939, zstd, drop bzip2
On Wed, May 08, 2019 at 09:04:49PM +0000, Jeremy Stanley wrote:
> On 2019-05-08 22:35:58 +0200 (+0200), Ansgar wrote:
> > Adam Borowski writes:
> > > I've recently did some research on how can we improve the speed of unpacking
> > > packages. There's a lot of other stages that can be improved, but let's
> > > talk about the .deb format.
> > >
> > > First, the 0.939 format, as described in "man deb-old". While still being
> > > accepted by dpkg, it had been superseded before even the very first stable
> > > release. Why? It has at least two upsides over 2.0:
> >
> > 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.
Binary packages use both.
$ ar t /var/cache/apt/archives/libgcc-9-dev_9.1.0-1_amd64.deb
debian-binary
control.tar.xz
data.tar.xz
Mike
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