On Fri, May 10 2019, Ian Jackson wrote:
>> On my embedded systems, I don't have ar installed, only tar. >> I assume, that dpkg speaks ar natively? > > dpkg-deb has a built-in decoder for the subset of ar that is used for > deb(5). One reason I chose ar rather than tar is that handwriting a > decoder for ar was much simpler than for tar. Plus, of course, when discussing tar, there is always the "which tar format do you mean?" question. https://manpages.debian.org/stretch/libarchive-dev/tar.5.en.html I should note that dpkg does have a maximum file size limit that's rather lower than the ar limit, due to its interpretation of tar headers. I believe I filed a bug on this but I'm not able to find it right now, unfortunately. John
