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Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 07:58:02 -0700
From: Tim Kientzle <kientzle@freebsd.org>
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To: Ivan Voras <ivoras@fer.hr>
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Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: New FreeBSD package system (a.k.a. Daemon Package System (dps))
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Ivan Voras wrote:
> - A quick test confirms that the current bsdtar will happily ignore any
> extra data at the end of a tgz/tbz archive, so package metadata can be
> embedded there, thus conserving existing infrastructure...

Not a good idea at all.

1) Keeping everything within the archive makes it
    possible for people to do surgery on the packages.
    Being able to extract/modify/rebuild packages
    using just tar makes it much easier to debug and
    experiment with new techniques.

2) The existing metadata format is not very pretty,
    but it can be reasonably extended.  (Personally,
    I don't find XML very pretty, either. ;-)

3) As DES pointed out, the package tools must be able
    to read the metadata before the files.  If you really
    need a completely separate metadata file, make it
    the second file in the archive.

Tim Kientzle