On Wed, Aug 01, 2007 at 06:04:07PM -0400, Adam Jackson wrote: > > cpio is a real standard archive format (there are something like a half > > dozen _different_ tar formats around) plus it is very simple. > > At the time only cpio was standardized. POSIX 2001 tar is probably > quite adequate by now. Certainly it's widely deployed on linux. POSIX 2001 tar is an ugly horrible hack. What you have to understand is that cpio is a really elegant archive format attached to a truely braindead application (/bin/cpio) while tar is a mass of ugly multi-layered hacks heaped on each other with a nice application. For RPM the fact the internal format is cpio is a huge win for simple and clean code (remember the archive parser is security sensitive), and it has no weird padding issues to mess up signing. Erik picked cpio for the original rpm package manager for very good reasons. > There are, of course, people who think using the same package manager > across multiple operating systems is an interesting exercise; those > people are insane. Well some of them are insane, successful and profitable in that case. Package management is a fairly portable problem for the most part. Alan -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
