We really want the ability to take a .tar.gz and directly import
it into a repository, without creating a temporary filesystem tree.
First, doing it this way is significantly faster. Also, this allows
us to handle importing tar files with e.g. uid 0 files into packed
repositories as non-root, which is very useful for tests and builds.
This necessitated a large set of changes.
We now support an "archive" mode for repositories. In this mode,
files are stored "packed" rather than hard linked. This allows one to
e.g. store an OSTree repository with root-owned files as non-root. It
is also used as the basis for serving repositories via HTTP.
While doing this I realized that GVariant is endianness-dependent; I
decided to just store all data in big endian.
Colin Walters