On Thu, 17 Jul 2003, Roger Leigh wrote: > Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 22:22:17 +0100 > From: Roger Leigh <roger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > To: Manish Singh <yosh@xxxxxxxx> > Cc: Alan Horkan <horkana@xxxxxxxxxxxx>, gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > Subject: Re: [Gimp-developer] Re: new-xcf [Re: Gimp-developer Digest, Vol 10, > Issue 18] > > Manish Singh <yosh@xxxxxxxx> writes: > > > I don't see a compelling argument to use zip/jar. It's complexity that > > doesn't buy us anything over ar. > > $ ar t gimp1.2-print_4.2.5-4_i386.deb > debian-binary > control.tar.gz > data.tar.gz > > The Debian dpkg ".deb" package format uses an ar archive with gzip > compressed members. It's very robust, and it's simple to extract > information from any of the members as needed. e.g. > > $ ar p gimp1.2-print_4.2.5-4_i386.deb control.tar.gz | tar xfz - ./md5sums you used a pipe what happened there is that you just unzipped the entire archive then in a seperate operation you extracted just the files you wanted. there is nothing wrong with that, you get better compression that way. In a zip archive you really do just extract the single file, there is no unzipping of the whole archive first, which is useful if you just want to grab one or two files quickly from a large archive. - Alan
