Re: .deb

[David Teague <dbt@elentari.cs.wcu.edu>]

On Fri, 10 Nov 2000, Glyn Millington wrote:


> On Fri, Nov 10, 2000 at 09:40:09PM -0800, thus spake Sathish C:
> > Hi All
> > 
> > I have Red Hat linux on my M/C. Can any body tell me how I can open
> > *.deb files?
> 
> Install Debian?

Glyn

This may be a flip answer, but Debian is much superior to Red Hat. 
Some of the rest of the boys and girls on this list can supply you
with reasons, but go to www.debian.org, and search the debian-user
mailing list with the search engine for Red and read the comparisons
they provide.

My own reason for Debian is the rational way it is designed, and my
reason for staying is this mailing list where anyone can get a good
answer to nearly any question at nearly any level, if asked the
least bit politely and with enough information so the question can
be answered.

To try to answer your question;

a .deb is just an ar (ar(chive)) file.  try 

	man ar

Then ar -t file.deb

to see the contents, which is pretty uninformative.  I did this to
for a pilot .deb file (part of pine) which has

debian-binary
control.tar.gz
data.tar.gz

which appears to me to be the same for all .deb files.

The debian-binary file has the version number. This file I got above
has 2.0 in it, but the a current stable version is 2.2

The control file is the installation scripts, post installation
(intialization scripts) removal scripts etc.

The data.tar.gz is exactly what it sounds like.

elentari:~/files/pine[3]tar ztvf data.tar.gz 
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 1999-10-28 11:47 ./
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 1999-10-28 11:47 ./usr/
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 1999-10-28 11:47 ./usr/bin/
-rwxr-xr-x root/root    196180 1999-10-28 11:47 ./usr/bin/pilot
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 1999-10-28 11:47 ./usr/man/
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 1999-10-28 11:47 ./usr/man/man1/
-rw-r--r-- root/root      1531 1999-10-12 14:29  ./usr/man/man1/pilot.1.gz
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 1999-10-28 11:47 ./usr/doc/
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 1999-10-28 11:47 ./usr/doc/pilot/
-rw-r--r-- root/root      3252 1999-10-28 11:47
./usr/doc/pilot/copyright
-rw-r--r-- root/root      3972 1999-10-28 11:45
./usr/doc/pilot/changelog.Debian.gz
elentari:~/files/pine[3]

This is just the files used in the installation. I don't think they
will be useful for any by-hand installation since there are things
the files from control do during installation that make many
packages work.

Hope this helps

--David
David Teague, dbt@cs.wcu.edu
Debian GNU/Linux Because software support is free, timely,
                 useful, technically accurate, and friendly.
                 (I hope this is all of the above.)