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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?

Florian Bach
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    I don't know `deb`; I'm an `rpm` guy. That said, I would split it into sub-packages. Maybe they just require each other and have names like `-core` and `-data` or even `-data` and `-data2`. – Aaron D. Marasco Nov 01 '20 at 18:55
  • is that a game? I've never seen normal software without textures and scenes being that huge. Anyway I think you can split into 2 deb packages and set one as the dependency. Or you can temporarily work around this by changing the compiling option, e.g enable [link time optimization](https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/LTO.html) or change to `-Os` – phuclv Nov 01 '20 at 23:38

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