thoughts on reorganizing BB menuconfig structure?

[Ole-Egil Hvitmyren]

Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Mar 2006, Rich Felker wrote:
>>On Thu, Mar 23, 2006 at 02:39:21PM -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>>
> 
>>>* i don't consider "ar" to be an "Archival Utility".  i see it
>>>more as a Development utility.  how many people are actually using
>>>"ar" for archiving?
>>
>>It's not very useful as a development tool without alsohaving
>>ranlib, since it can't generate the index for the contained .o
>>files. IIRC either RPM or dpkg uses ar files as archives.
> 
> 
> ???.  RPM uses cpio internally, and dpkg uses tarballs, no?

ar IS an archiver, that's actually the full name of the program. The
Debian package format uses ar to hold three files, two of which are
already archived and compressed with tar and gzip. The third holds the
package format version information.

$ file ../libcurl3_7.15.1-1_i386.deb
../libcurl3_7.15.1-1_i386.deb: Debian binary package (format 2.0)
$ ar x ../libcurl3_7.15.1-1_i386.deb
$ ls -l
-rw-r--r--  1 olegil olegil   1202 2006-03-24 10:24 control.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 olegil olegil 164195 2006-03-24 10:24 data.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 olegil olegil      4 2006-03-24 10:24 debian-binary
$ cat debian-binary
2.0


So when using busybox on a rescue disk or similar (installer, etc) for
Debian systems, ar is absolutely 100% positively necessary.

What I want to know is why do we keep using that archaic tape archiver
program? Anyone here needed to archive something to tape? :-P

(just in case: that was a joke, ok)

Ole-Egil