Adam Borowski writes: > I've recently did some research on how can we improve the speed of unpacking > packages. There's a lot of other stages that can be improved, but let's > talk about the .deb format. > > First, the 0.939 format, as described in "man deb-old". While still being > accepted by dpkg, it had been superseded before even the very first stable > release. Why? It has at least two upsides over 2.0:
Switching to a different binary format will break various tools. If we want to do this, I wonder if we shouldn't take the chance to move away from tar? We have various applications that only want to extract single members of the package (changelog, NEWS, copyright, ...); tar is a really bad format for such an operation. Other formats (zip, 7z, ...) are more suited for them. Ansgar
