[OSUNIX-dev] Yet another package format - Feedback wanted

["C. Bergström"]

Fabian Groffen wrote:
>
> I think what you're really measuring here is bzip2 vs lzma compression.
> Gentoo's xpak can be done with lzma or gzip as well IMO.  It's not
> really an argument, but more like I think you should focus your decision
> on the metadata part.  Things like how easy it can be extracted
> (with/without compression tools?), transparency, etc.
>
> My 0.02 ${currency}.
>   
You're right.. bzip2 vs xz (lzma2) I just went with the default.. If I 
really wanted to play unfair I'd toss deb or some rpm variant in there.. 
(In fairness suse which uses lzma may not do too badly?)

However.. both these formats are directly extractable and at a 
functional level quite similar.

In terms of accessing the metadata

xar --dump-toc=foo.xml -f /usr/portage/packages/app-editors/vim-7.2.021.oxe

 From there it almost becomes semantics since parsing the very small 
amount of metadata is trivial.  In this case I prefer a tool with 
built-in support that I can checksum instead of just tagging xpak on the 
end.  Both have advantages depending how you look at it.

./C