On Mon, Sep 23, 2002 at 11:08:02AM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 22, 2002 at 07:20:35PM -0500, Adam Heath wrote:
> > On Sun, 22 Sep 2002, Branden Robinson wrote:
[pedantic language arguments]
> > 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.
I am working on such a tool. However, I need a specification of how each
ar works, what its files look like, etc. in order for this to work
properly. A URL would be fabulous. This tool is in C++, so C users can
call it with system(3).
> 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.
There ar many different types of ar files; the type that GNU ar chose
was obviously not the same type that Debian chose. I read (I believe on
Slashdot) that the type Debian chose was purposely ancient because it
would be possible to open them up on any system, even those that were
from old times. GNU ar can still extract debian files, in fact it does
it quite well with "ar x foo.deb". It just doesn't create them, which is
our problem.
--
Brian M. Carlson <karlsson@hal-pc.org> <http://decoy.wox.org/~bmc> 0x560553E7
Immutability, Three Rules of:
(1) If a tarpaulin can flap, it will.
(2) If a small boy can get dirty, he will.
(3) If a teenager can go out, he will.
Attachment:
pgpJpEatNWAPn.pgp
Description: PGP signature