Re: fwd: [tomsrtbt] More "Tom doesn't like .RPM _or_ .DEB"
On Mon, Oct 18, 1999 at 12:57:23PM -0400, Steve Dunham wrote:
> David Damerell <damerell@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
>
> > In article <[🔎] 19991015134814.G29188@lappy.djj.state.va.us> you write:
> > >On Fri, Oct 15, 1999 at 08:09:30PM +0300, Teemu Hukkanen wrote:
> > >>>From tomsrtbt mailing-list
> > >Who cares what he likes or doesn't like?
>
> > I have no idea why this was forwarded to debian-devel; but on the tomsrtbt
> > mailing list we care what Tom Oehser likes because he is the compiler of an
> > extremely high quality rescue floppy (which the list is about).
>
> > In particular, it would be nice if Tom's rescue disc could pick apart
> > .debs and .rpms. RPM is basically a lost cause, but .debs look feasible;
> > in particular, if the outer file was a tarfile and not an arfile it would
> > be trivial (yes, I know that normally one should always use the Debian
> > tools because the format of a .deb may change, but this is not really an
> > option on a rescue disc), hence Tom's annoyance.
>
> "dpkg-deb" is the program that actually extracts everything. The
> source is small and in one file. (But I think it spawns a tar and
> gzip process. It does the "ar" stuff itself.)
For what it's worth (I'm on the road and am not reading debian email
for the most part): you can completely extract the contents of a
debian package if you have a mounted file system and sash. You have
to do it by hand (apt doesn't take scripts), but apt has built in
support for both tar and ar.
In principle, you don't need any other files in the filesystem, since
sash is statically linked -- as long as you're using a boot loader you
can boot with init=/bin/sash (or whatever).
--
Raul
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