So many formats, So few packages

[Anders F Björklund]

Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:

>> Shouldn't some of the more useless / unneeded ones,
>> like cpio/xar and dpkg/xpkg, be removed from "base" ?
>> 
>> It's just cluttering up the code, without getting used.
>> Wouldn't it be better to pick one or two, and use them ?
> 
> Absolutely.  The current de-facto policy of "support everything! (sorta)" is only providing an ongoing distraction from the higher-order goal of creating a manufacturing line where everything gets built regularly and then "published" to a packages collection which end-users can then consume from the command line or a GUI front-end.

Actually the real question was if we couldn't just remove the buggy dpkg port and dpkg format from MacPorts, since "fixing" that was lead to the posting.

Removing xar was mostly because it is dead upstream and because it doesn't really add anything beyond poor compression (per-file) and metadata in XML...

--anders