On Fri, 2019-05-10 at 11:04 +0200, Thomas Goirand wrote: > On 5/9/19 6:25 PM, Andrej Shadura wrote: > > How about the format opkg used for some time, which is a .deb file > > but > > with tar as the outer container format instead of ar? > > This is a very bad idea. When installing a large amount of packages, > apt > needs to uncompress all control.tar.gz files so it can get the config > and templates of debconf. With tar, meaning without an index, one may > need to uncompress the whole of the .deb file in order to extract > just a > tiny portion of it. This could potentially be super long (think: a > dist-upgrade with so many packages...).
The outer container would probably be uncompressed; as it has only very few members (dummy file, control.tar.*, data.tar.*, ${something-new}), accessing any of these few members is fast (as you can just seek from one header to the next and only need to do so few times). Ansgar