On Sun, 2011-03-06 at 08:50:30 +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote: > On Sat, 05 Mar 2011, Josh Triplett wrote: > > dpkg-deb --fsys-tarfile /dev/stdin seems to work, but it would help to > > have some guarantee in the documentation that it will always work, and > > dpkg-deb will never seek on the input. > > Help for what? What's your use case? > > I don't really see the advantage that we get to commit to such a > restriction. (--fsys-tarfile is mainly used by dpkg itself)
Well, I don't see the gain in allowing the packages to be processed non-sequentially. So this “restriction” is a feature IMO, which allows streaming package data. Any future extension to the format should allow sequental extraction. Building is a different matter and I don't see much problem with random access if needed. Also any current assumption in the code that the extraction needs random access is a bug IMO. I fixed on such issue some time ago, so I don't think there are any more, and a problem with slurping entire package contents. Anyway I'm mentioning sequential access, instead of non-seekable, because I reserve the right to seek forwards to skip contents and fallback to reading and discarding. Pushing a tiny patch for this. thanks, guillem -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
