Are there any slick tools for making split .debs? I've been getting up to speed with debhelper, but I couldn't find a way to make it generate a split archive. On May 17, 2016 7:09 PM, "Guillem Jover" <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi! > > On Mon, 2016-05-16 at 11:42:02 -0600, Nicholas Clark wrote: > > I ran into an interesting limitation of the .deb package format today. I > > work at an electronics design company, where I maintain my company's > build > > servers. We use some vendor-supplied toolchains that have very large > > installations (~30GB uncompressed). > > > > I've been trying to repackage these toolchains so that I can control > their > > configuration and deployment, and I hit something interesting. Since .deb > > files are built using 'ar' at the top-level, they can't hold any single > > files that are larger than 9.99GB, which appears to be a fundamental > > limitation of the ar format. > > Yes, and a known one: > > <https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/TimeTravelFixes> > > also mentioned in the format spec: > > <http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/deb.5.html>a > > I've now added locally the other limitation coming from each tar entry > size inside a tar archive, which is 8 GiB per tar entry (uncompressed). > > > Is there anything I can do to get around this? If not would it be > possible > > to make some tweaks to the .deb file format in a future release? Maybe > > replacing 'ar' with tar, or allowing multiple data archive files in the > > package? > > There are few workarounds. One is to use stronger compression so that > the ar members are smaller and fit better. The other might be to split > the contents in several binary packages, so that you don't reach the > limit. > > Thanks, > Guillem >
