> Did you know the underlying archive format was cpio? CPIO! And what's wrong with that? deb's underlying format is ar, which is basically the same class of si

> Did you know the underlying archive format was cpio? CPIO! And what's wrong with that? deb's underlying format is ar, which is basically the same class of simple archives that cpio is. It solves the problem with two nice benefits: 1. You're not reinventing an archive format, the existing ones are perfectly adequate. 2. If your system is borked enough that you don't even have a working package manager, you can manually extract your package manager from a package file with nothing more than the cpio or ar programs.