Brett Parker iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk writes:
.tgz is the standard SlackWare packages format, it's been that way for years, you wouldn't have encountered it unless you'd used slackware, there *are* some .tgz files that are 'slackware specific', it's just that they are few and far between. And they're normally fairly well labelled as SlackWare packages.
It's not stoopid, the slackware packages *are* just binaries in a .tgz file, with a couple of scripts in there for setting stuff up nicely. It's no worse an idea than .rpm.
RPMs are gzip'd cpio archives with a special header to stop you unpicking them with standard tools. Slackware's approach seems more sensible to me, not merely "no worse".
deb files are ar archives of which some of the members are .tar.gz files. Same sort of idea again though a little more complicated.