W. Martin Borgert writes ("Re: .deb format: let's use 0.939, zstd, drop bzip2"):
> Quoting Sam Hartman <hartm...@debian.org>:
> > I've certainly heard people describe our use of both ar and tar as an
> > architectural minus especially on embedded platforms just because the
> > dependency set of dpkg needed to be larger.
>
> On my embedded systems, I don't have ar installed, only tar.
> I assume, that dpkg speaks ar natively?
dpkg-deb has a built-in decoder for the subset of ar that is used for
deb(5). One reason I chose ar rather than tar is that handwriting a
decoder for ar was much simpler than for tar.
Ian.
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