On Thu, 2007-08-02 at 16:20 +0200, Michael Schroeder wrote:
On Thu, Aug 02, 2007 at 04:53:43PM +0300, Jonathan Dieter wrote:
> What about extending the cpio format? Something called cpio2, perhaps.
>
> The main problem with using cpio is that individual files have a limit
> of 2GB (which isn't a problem in most cases, but it is a limit). Why
> not push a newer cpio format that changes all 16-bit and 32-bit records
> to 64-bit (along with specifying endienness)?
Actually the cpio format used in rpm is 'newc', which encodes
all values as 8 ASCII bytes of hex. So it's a 4 GB size limit.
But, as already said, it's not just the cpio format you'd have
to extend, it's also rpm's header data.
Cheers,
Michael.
Fair enough, though 4 GB may not be large enough when we're talking
virtual hard drives (see message just posted a minute ago).
And, yes, there wouldn't be much point in extending the cpio format if
we didn't fix the rpm header as well. But I wouldn't see much point in
extending the cpio format if rpm wasn't going to use it.
Jonathan