On 12/18/05, Steinar H. Gunderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sun, Dec 18, 2005 at 02:56:10PM +0100, Olaf van der Spek wrote: > > Why would this be huge? > > Why is it that hard to plugin another codec? > > You'd have to rewrite about every single tool in the world handling .debs, > make up a transition plan and upgrade from that. Not to mention that you'd
Why is the knowledge of how to decode a .deb distributed over so many tools? > have to make sure it works on all kinds of obscure platforms actually using > the thing. (And yes, I have used ar and tar to extract debs, and consider it > a quite useful feature.) Why would that stop working if you switch compression schemes? I guess tar is coded to use gzip with -z and bzip2 with -j, but why is there no generic way to add coders/decoders (codecs) to tar (and other applications that wish to use compression filters)? > The .deb format is _fixed_ -- this isn't AVI where you just "plug in another > codec" and hope it works.
