On 21.08.2025 04:50, Guillem Jover wrote: > As you probably know the deb 2.x packaging format [D] is based on an > ar container, with tar members for its format definition, control > metadata and filesystem data payloads (among others). > > A problem that has been known for a while now [S], is that the ar format > has a file size limit, which means the deb format is thus limited to > filesystem payloads (usually compressed) of at most around 9536.74 MiB. > > This is starting to become an issue, and it's something that has been > bothering me for a bit, because support for a new deb format should be > ready way before we need it, as older tools should ideally be able to > handle it. And there are multiple tools involved that will need to be > updated [T].
Hasn't there been an extension to cover that for many years, using "!<arch64>\n" as file signature? I do not know, however, for well formalized that extension is, which solely differs from traditional archives by having a 20-byte size field (in place of the 10-byte one). Jan
