On Mon, Aug 14, 2000 at 11:08:59PM -0700, Joey Hess wrote: > > Perhaps these sub-packages would be additional files in the ar file. > Perhaps those files themselves should be in .deb format? Then we have > sub package nesting and meta-data too.... > > > Of course this is all just off hand... :> > > Same.
Irix does that with it's packages: multiple micropackages in one file. Actually, you can also get jumbo packages, just tarballs ("tardist") with lots of packages inside them, each package with lots of micropackages. Beyond the modifications to the .deb format we'd also need to modify the way dpkg stores package information. ls /var/lib/dpkg/info just took 30 seconds on my machine. Each package has several files in there. At 4K and 1 inode apiece, the dpkg overhead is even higher than the overhead for microdebs all in separate files. Tasks wouldn't be well served by jumbo packages - there'd still have to be some support for a hierarchy beyond the .deb layer, so the hierarchy support should probably not be related to the actual file handling at all. Maybe .debs could simply contain other, simpler .debs. That should be fairly easy to unpack with existing dpkg functions (whatever extracts streams from the ar format), and would allow an infinitely deep and arbitrarily broken-into-separate-files division. Signed .debs are probably an issue. -Drake