Ian Jackson writes: > Ansgar writes ("Re: .deb format: let's use 0.939, zstd, drop bzip2"): >> `ar` needs to be replaced for the file size limitation mentioned in the >> initial mail: ar represents file size as a 10 digit decimal number[1] >> which limits the members (control.tar.*, data.tar.*) to ~10G. > ... >> Replacing `ar` is an incompatible format change. So if we already do >> an incompatible change, it is an appropriate time to bundle any other >> incompatible changes (if there are any). That is why I suggested that >> it might be useful to also replace the `tar` archives with another >> format. > > As has been pointed out, we have done many incompatible format > changes. Every new compression algorithm is one. It isn't really a > big problem, when managed properly. > > So I strongly disagree. The archive size limit is getting more and > more annoying. We should not let fixing that be entangled with some > random other nice-to-haves.
Changing container formats is a more invasive change than just compression algorithms (of which there are already several anyway); I believe it is a bad idea to create too many new formats that would require long-term support in dpkg. Ansgar