[Rpm-maint] [RFC][PATCH] Large file support

[Mark Rosenstand]

On Thu, 2009-09-10 at 12:53 +0200, Florian Festi wrote:
> On 09/09/2009 08:32 PM, Ville Skyttä wrote:
> > On Wednesday 09 September 2009, Florian Festi wrote:
> >    
> >> Having a look at the tar formats I do not belief that switching to tar
> >> is a real option. The format is just horrible (GNU tar needs over 200
> >> lines to read an integer out of a header field) and full of hacks to
> >> remain backward compatible (header in header + extentions). This would
> >> be all not that bad if there where a nice little library we could link
> >> against...
> >>      
> > libtar doesn't qualify?  http://www.feep.net/libtar/
> >
> > Not that I know anything about it, but it might at least satisfy "little".
> >    
> It didn't look very trust worthy when visiting the page some days ago. 
> Having a look at the ML archive now I am quite sure that it doesn't 
> qualify. A library would need to be under active maintenance and have a 
> chance to be still around in 5 or 10 years. GNU tar e.g. would, but they 
> don't offer a library...

libtar is small but did the job very well for I've used it for. I know
that at least CMake carry a modified private copy. Perhaps RPM could do
the same, or even better, talk to the friendly CMake developers and
share the efforts? :)

> Anyway, thanks for having a look. If there is a great library or archive 
> format that should e considered feel free to bring it up.

What about libarchive? Although admittedly it's no longer as small as it
used to be, the maintainer has been doing a good job of doing regular
releases for a long time and will most likely continue since it's used
by tar in the FreeBSD base system (and he's a FreeBSD developer.)