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.