From: guillem@debian.org 
  
 Hi! 
  
 As you probably know the deb 2.x packaging format [D] is based on an 
 ar container, with tar members for its format definition, control 
 metadata and filesystem data payloads (among others). 
  
 A problem that has been known for a while now [S], is that the ar format 
 has a file size limit, which means the deb format is thus limited to 
 filesystem payloads (usually compressed) of at most around 9536.74 MiB. 
  
 This is starting to become an issue, and it's something that has been 
 bothering me for a bit, because support for a new deb format should be 
 ready way before we need it, as older tools should ideally be able to 
 handle it. And there are multiple tools involved that will need to be 
 updated [T]. 
  
 Something that occurred to me very recently, is that extending the ar 
 format could be a viable solution, by using the same extension used in 
 tar, that is, using its base-256 encoding for the ar header fields. 
  
 Implementation wise this should not involve much code, and it would 
 only be used iff the members require it, which for static libraries 
 I guess would not be usual, but if that ever becomes the case, then 
 that problem would also be solved there. 
  
 For the deb format I'm thinking this would be my preferred way forward, 
 and given that the ar format is not portable anyway (for example AIX's 
 ar cannot extract deb archives), and that this would not affect the 
 debootstrap/debian-installer case (where we might not have dpkg-deb 
 available), nor most of the binary packages in something like Debian, 
 I'd probably be finishing implementing this in dpkg for the upcoming 
 1.23.x release, if there's no strong reason not to. 
  
 Would such an extension be acceptable for GNU binutils? If so I'd 
 file a feature request. :) 
  
 Thanks, 
 Guillem 
  
 [D] https://manpages.debian.org/deb.5 
 [S] https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/TimeTravelFixes#deb-size-limit 
 [T] https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/DebSupport 
  
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