Hello,
Dave Martin [2010-08-06 13:35 +0100]:
Just to clarify my meaning--- I expected to have a tarball per package, not one massive tarball for the whole system... the cost of maintaining the latter would certainly get very unpleasant for people.
Hm, but then you wouldn't save a lot -- you'd have a small tarball instead of a small copyright file, and the only thing you'd save would be the directory entry.
I can foresee problems if a post-unpack hook creates a file dpkg doesn't know about --- the tarball (presumably not in the package's file list) could silently be overwritten when installing another package.
Creating files dpkg doesn't know about is not a problem per se -- but of course dpkg wouldn't know how to remove it on removal or upgrade, so you have to cope with all of those in the hook.
Martin