On Thu, Apr 17, 1997 at 02:53:12PM -0400, Raymond A. Ingles wrote: > Just out of curiosity, why did Debian decide to use a .deb package > format, as opposed to, say, a "debian_control" file inside the .tar > archive? So far as I can see: > > CONS: > Cannnot use the Debianized package without dpkg. > Difficult to "unDebianize".
Not at all; I quite often extract debian packages by hand on non-debian systems to get documentation etc. The .deb is an ar archive, containing some .tar files. Use "ar x <filename.deb>" to extract the internal stuff. > Using the universally (well, Unixversally) supported .tar standard has > only one con that I can see - you have to at least use "tar -t" to see if > the package has been Debianized. This seems a small price to pay to avoid > the other disadvantages. Same story with Redhat. Slackware uses .tgz, but there are basically no packages available except the standard distribution, and they're just a big of control info added -- not a lot different to Debian, really. Hamish -- Hamish Moffatt, StudIEAust [EMAIL PROTECTED] Student, computer science & computer systems engineering. 3rd year, RMIT. http://yallara.cs.rmit.edu.au/~moffatt (PGP key here) CPOM: [**** ] 40% -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
