RPM roadmapping

[Peter Jones]

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.

Extending the header data is a quite solvable; I don't think it's even 
all that difficult.  There was discussion about it more than a year ago, 
with several options proposed.  One was even backward compatible.

-- 
   Peter