OESF Portables Forum

General Forums => General Discussion => Topic started by: qx773 on January 01, 2006, 07:19:44 pm

Title: Awk Tar File Is Actually An Ipk
Post by: qx773 on January 01, 2006, 07:19:44 pm

I just downloaded awk from the ELSI library with Internet Explorer, and the file that I got was a *.tar file.  I tried to view the tar file, but it looked like a binary file, so I changed the file extension to *.tar.gz and attempted to gunzip it, and it worked.  gunzip extracted a debian-binary and control*.gz and some other *.gz file, which made the original file seem like an *.ipk.  I then started from the beginning and renamed the extension to *.ipk.  I installed the *.ipk, and my C760, running the Sharp ROM, indicated that some files could not be installed, but awk seems to run fine.

Title: Awk Tar File Is Actually An Ipk
Post by: Da_Blitz on January 01, 2006, 09:36:30 pm

yep thats all a dpkg or ipkg is, thogh i thoght they were just using .tar/.ar to prevent compressing files twice

Title: Awk Tar File Is Actually An Ipk
Post by: qx773 on January 02, 2006, 09:25:10 am

tar files by themselves are not compressed, which is why you often see them with an additional extension of tar.gz after they have been compressed with gzip.  It is just going to confuse people when they download a tar file and cannot extract files from it.

Title: Awk Tar File Is Actually An Ipk
Post by: Da_Blitz on January 03, 2006, 03:57:29 am

might want to reread my post, i said .tar/.ar to prevent compresion twice, OTHERWISE it would be .tar.gz/.ar.gz because the packages in the arcive (eg control) are already compresed and the infomation file would not benifit that much from compresion, it also speeds up retriving file info as you dont have to decompress to get its depedencies

Title: Awk Tar File Is Actually An Ipk
Post by: lardman on January 03, 2006, 12:34:01 pm

Quote

thogh i thoght they were just using .tar/.ar to prevent compressing files twice

.tar.gz wrapper for all of the old ipkg versions, ar wrapper for the new ipkg versions (can also read tar.gz).

http://www.handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/Ipkg (http://www.handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/Ipkg)

Si

Title: Awk Tar File Is Actually An Ipk
Post by: qx773 on January 03, 2006, 10:10:17 pm

The bottom line is:  if an *.ipk file is named *.tar, then it will confuse people who attempt to extract files from the *.tar file, so it makes no sense to name an *.ipk file as a *.tar file.  Perhaps Internet Explorer is detecting the type of file based on the first few bytes of the file and then renaming the file incorrectly.