I am trying to package a Linux software into a DEB archive so it can easily be installed on Debian / Ubuntu. Unfortunately the full software is about 13 GB in size, and whenever I try to create a debian package (either with FPM or directly with dpkg-deb) I receive an error like "ar element size 13099925924 is too large".
A quick Google search showed me that apparently the file size for files in a .deb archive (of which the data.tar.gz is one) is 10 digits, which would be 9999999999 bytes, or about 10 GB. Is there a way to get around this limit? Different archival formats that are still usable as a DEB archive by Debian / Ubuntu?
I found this article on lwn.net - https://lwn.net/Articles/789449/ - which describes the problem I'm having. It mentions some other, older way to create a DEB package that doesn't have this 10GB limitation, but I was unable to figure out how to use / create this, and if that format from pre-1995 is even still supported in modern Debian versions.
Or do I have to split up the contents into two DEB packages, each requiring eachother so that the user can't install just one of them?
Asked by Florian Bach
(263 rep)
Nov 1, 2020, 06:46 PM