On Sat, 7 Oct 2000, Julian Assange wrote:

: > : Is there any compressed archive format that is efficiently updatable?
: 
: gzip * && ar -qc *

Note, you probably want "ar rc", not "ar qc", as the latter will cause some
rather surprising results on systems with a non-GNU ar.  The GNU ar that we
have aliases "q" to "r" internally.

This could work, provided that all systems to use pkgsrc can handle long
"ar" filenames, and that we provide "ar" archives for all such systems.  In
particular, we would need to supply both a 4.4BSD format archive and a SVR4
format archive.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv@wasabisystems.com>  *  http://www.wasabisystems.com/
-- Speed, stability, security, and support.  Wasabi NetBSD:  Run with it.