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

[Andrej Shadura <andrew@shadura.me>]

On Fri, 10 May 2019 at 06:47, Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl> wrote:
> > The crazy idea I came up with at the time was to use a dual-format PAX+ar
> > container (that would embed the ar(5) header in the first PAX name entry).
> > This would make old tools at least detect this is a .deb package, with a
> > higher major version.
> [...]
> > So I think Andrej is on the spot, and we should just switch from ar(5)
> > to tar(5) as the container
>
> I would heavily advise against archive-in-archive.  Especially not tar, with
> its block madness.  The blocks disappear when compressed but you're not
> going to compress the outer layer.  Also, you can't shed the outer layer of
> tar without a filter.

You may be amazed, but that’s actually what ipkg used to do (and opkg
still supports):

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20100823030002/http://www.handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/Ipkg#head-133c8da00cf5d277becb22540e75e6fbe5536902

[2]: https://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/opkg/tree/libopkg/opkg_archive.c#n523

(I think it would be quite ironic if Debian switches to a package
format derived from Debian to be used elsewhere.)

-- 
Cheers,
  Andrej