On Thu, 2019-05-09 at 12:32 +0000, Jeremy Stanley wrote: > On 2019-05-09 06:27:36 +0900 (+0900), Mike Hommey wrote: > > On Wed, May 08, 2019 at 09:04:49PM +0000, Jeremy Stanley wrote: > [...] > > > 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 > > Ahh, yes, thanks I should have remembered that... so then my > question becomes: is the suggestion to replace *both* ar and tar in > the binary package format with a single flat archive, or to switch > out the tarballs inside the ar archive but continue using ar to > aggregate them?
`ar` needs to be replaced for the file size limitation mentioned in the initial mail: ar represents file size as a 10 digit decimal number[1] which limits the members (control.tar.*, data.tar.*) to ~10G. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ar_(Unix)#File_header Replacing `ar` is an incompatible format change. So if we already do an incompatible change, it is an appropriate time to bundle any other incompatible changes (if there are any). That is why I suggested that it might be useful to also replace the `tar` archives with another format. Ansgar
