On Fri, 10 May 2019 at 06:47, Adam Borowski <[email protected]> wrote: > > The crazy idea I came up with at the time was to use a dual-format PAX+ar > > container (that would embed the ar(5) header in the first PAX name entry). > > This would make old tools at least detect this is a .deb package, with a > > higher major version. > [...] > > So I think Andrej is on the spot, and we should just switch from ar(5) > > to tar(5) as the container > > I would heavily advise against archive-in-archive. Especially not tar, with > its block madness. The blocks disappear when compressed but you're not > going to compress the outer layer. Also, you can't shed the outer layer of > tar without a filter.
You may be amazed, but that’s actually what ipkg used to do (and opkg still supports): [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20100823030002/http://www.handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/Ipkg#head-133c8da00cf5d277becb22540e75e6fbe5536902 [2]: https://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/opkg/tree/libopkg/opkg_archive.c#n523 (I think it would be quite ironic if Debian switches to a package format derived from Debian to be used elsewhere.) -- Cheers, Andrej
