Talk:Ar (Unix)

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I've never entirely understood the differences in intent between ar and tar. I know that ar can create a symbol index for object files in the archive; and that tar has many more options for the structure of the file and the restoring of (e.g.) ownership and permissions. However, it's not clear to me, for instance, why the Debian package format (.deb files) prefers ar over tar, even though debs do not rely on a symbol index. --FOo 23:10, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

IIRC the ar format was chosen simply because it was sufficient and simpler to implement in dpkg :) --Joy [shallot] 10:42, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Whilst you're a Debian developer and may know better, I was under the impression that ar was used because it was possible to get libmagic/file(1) to recognise .debs as Debian packages. In any case, dpkg handles tar.gz files. --Lucidion 14:14, 13 September 2006 (UTC)