On 21 Oct 1999, Goswin Brederlow wrote: > Of cause policy should encourage to use bzip2 (or gzip if smaller) and > base packages must use tar.gz (or tar.bz2 if bzip2 is in base) so > that one can update debian. Any package using a non default > compression must predepend on that compressor, but that should be > clear for the packaging scripts and maintainer.
If there has to be a line added to control, why not instead make a new line such as "Archive: tar.bz2" (with Archive: tar.gz assumed if not specified) and not worry about a custom how_to_unpack script? Granted, this method would only support predefined types but would be simpler, and there aren't _that_ many formats people are dying to use - tar.gz and tar.bz2 (and possibly tar.Z) could probably make 99.9% of everyone happy, and stuff like tar.zip, tar.arj, tar.lha etc could be added if anyone really wanted it. Chris Pimlott (IANADD)