Let's examine one example package a little bit closer. E.g. file 'parted_1.4.24-4_i386.deb' contains these three files:
$ ar tv parted_1.4.24-4_i386.deb rw-r--r-- 0/0 4 Mar 28 13:46 2002 debian-binary rw-r--r-- 0/0 1386 Mar 28 13:46 2002 control.tar.gz rw-r--r-- 0/0 39772 Mar 28 13:46 2002 data.tar.gz |
Now we can start to extract all files including the content of the tar files.
The content of this file is "2.0\n". This states the version of the deb file format. For 2.0 all other lines get ignored.
The 'data.tar.gz' file contains all the files that will be installed with their destination paths:
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2002-03-28 13:44:57 ./ drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2002-03-28 13:44:49 ./sbin/ -rwxr-xr-x root/root 31656 2002-03-28 13:44:49 ./sbin/parted drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2002-03-28 13:44:38 ./usr/ drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2002-03-28 13:44:41 ./usr/share/ drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2002-03-28 13:44:38 ./usr/share/man/ drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2002-03-28 13:44:52 ./usr/share/man/man8/ -rw-r--r-- root/root 1608 2002-03-28 13:44:37 ./usr/share/man/man8/parted.8.gz drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2002-03-28 13:44:41 ./usr/share/doc/ drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2002-03-28 13:44:52 ./usr/share/doc/parted/ -rw-r--r-- root/root 1880 2002-03-07 14:20:08 ./usr/share/doc/parted/README.Debian -rw-r--r-- root/root 1347 2002-02-27 01:40:50 ./usr/share/doc/parted/copyright -rw-r--r-- root/root 6444 2002-03-28 13:37:33 ./usr/share/doc/parted/changelog.Debian.gz -rw-r--r-- root/root 15523 2002-03-28 02:36:43 ./usr/share/doc/parted/changelog.gz |
It must be the last file in the deb archive.
In our example this file has the following content:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1336 Mar 28 2002 control -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 388 Mar 28 2002 md5sums -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 253 Mar 28 2002 postinst -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 194 Mar 28 2002 prerm |
'md5sums' contains for each file in data.tar.gz the md5sum. In our example the content looks like this:
1d15dcfb6bb23751f76a2b7b844d3c57 sbin/parted 4eb9cc2e192f1b997cf13ff0b921af74 usr/share/man/man8/parted.8.gz 2f356768104a09092e26a6abb012c95e usr/share/doc/parted/README.Debian a6259bd193f8f150c171c88df2158e3e usr/share/doc/parted/copyright 7f8078127a689d647586420184fc3953 usr/share/doc/parted/changelog.Debian.gz 98f217a3bf8a7407d66fd6ac8c5589b7 usr/share/doc/parted/changelog.gz |
Don't worry, the 'md5sum' file as well as the 'postinst' and 'prerm' files are not mandatory for your first package. But please take a note of their existence, every proper official Debian package has them for good reasons.
'prerm' and 'postinst' seem to take care of removing old documentation files and adding a link from doc to share/doc.
And finally the most interesting file:
$ cat control Package: parted Version: 1.4.24-4 Section: admin Priority: optional Architecture: i386 Depends: e2fsprogs (>= 1.27-2), libc6 (>= 2.2.4-4), libncurses5 (>= \ 5.2.20020112a-1), libparted1.4 (>= 1.4.13+14pre1), libreadline4 (>= \ 4.2a-4), libuuid1 Suggests: parted-doc Conflicts: fsresize Replaces: fsresize Installed-Size: 76 Maintainer: Timshel Knoll <[email protected]> Description: The GNU Parted disk partition resizing program GNU Parted is a program that allows you to create, destroy, resize, move and copy hard disk partitions. This is useful for creating space for new operating systems, reorganizing disk usage, and copying data to new hard disks. . This package contains the Parted binary and manual page. . Parted currently supports DOS, Mac, Sun, BSD, GPT and PC98 disklabels/partition tables, as well as a 'loop' (raw disk) type which allows use on RAID/LVM. Filesystems supported are ext2, ext3, FAT (FAT16 and FAT32) and linux-swap. Parted can also detect HFS (Mac OS), JFS, NTFS, ReiserFS, UFS and XFS filesystems, but cannot create/remove/resize/check these filesystems yet. . The nature of this software means that any bugs could cause massive data loss. While there are no known bugs at the moment, they could exist, so please back up all important files before running it, and do so at your own risk. |
Further information about the control file can be obtained via 'man 5 deb-control'.