On Sun, Sep 22, 2002 at 07:20:35PM -0500, Adam Heath wrote:
> On Sun, 22 Sep 2002, Branden Robinson wrote:
> > One of the selling points of the Debian package format is that it can be
> > manipulated with "standard tools".
>
> manipulated != created
Creation is a subset of manipulation. Other "manipulations" include
extraction, appending members, replacement of members, and listing the
contents.
> debsigs is an official creator. Therefor, it *must* not put / on the end of
> the member names.
Fine; I suggest that we either hack ar in our binutils to support
options that enable it to create .deb-correct ar files, or that we ship
a tool in debianutils ("dar"?) that is capable of doing so.
We must do either of the above, abandon our claim that Debian package
files have anything to do with the ar format, or make our tools more
intelligent, so that they can understand a .deb that any
standard-compliant ar program created.
> > Apt refusing to deal with ar files that have the Debian components in
> > the proper order, but which were generated by the only ar program that
> > Debian provides is *perverse*.
>
> This is true. But debsigs is still buggy.
Debian has long claimed that our packages are just "ar files". This
implies that you can use ar(1) to create them, but you can't (well, you
can, but they won't work).
I suggest we not abandon this claim.
--
G. Branden Robinson | The key to being a Southern
Debian GNU/Linux | Baptist: It ain't a sin if you
branden@debian.org | don't get caught.
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Anthony Davidson
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