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 accepted by dpkg, it had been superseded before even the very first stable 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