Following suggestion, I've written a paragraph about the xpak payload. I
think it helps clear things. I think it can be added to the portage(5)
manpage, but would be happy to hear other suggestions.
<BEGIN>
Binary packages
A binary package is an image of a pre-built installation. The merging
process of such a package skipps building from source on the target
host. Portage supports the creation and installation of binary packages.
See emerge(1) for more information.
A binary package is stored as a .tbz file. Format consists of a bzip2
archive of the installation, with an extra chunk of data appended at the
end. This extra binary data is called the 'xpak' archive (add: origin of
name). It is a binary dump of the package's database entry (under
/var/db/pkg). When a binary package is installed, the xpak payload is
used to generate the entry in the package database. It is also used by
emerge in the installation process (e.g. verifying arch compatibility).
For more information about the format of the xpak archive, see xpak(5).
Extracting the xpak archive from the .tbz file can be achieved with
qtbz2. Reading the xpak archive can be done using qxpak. See qtbz2(1)
and qxpak(1) for more info.
<END>
Comments, please.
Amit
Zac Medico wrote:
Amit Dor-Shifer wrote:
> I don't think I would have realized this implementation myself. Is this
> xpak piggybacking documented somewhere?Can you refer me?
> BTW:
> amit0 Installation # man xpak
> No manual entry for xpak
> amit0 Installation # man 5 xpak
> No entry for xpak in section 5 of the manual
> amit0 Installation # eix -S xpak
> No matches found.
The xpak.5 man page is included with >=portage-2.1.6.11. Here's a copy:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~zmedico/portage/doc/man/xpak.5.html
Zac
