Re: Bug#94827: tktable; Build-Depends: debhelper
On 01-May-01, 12:19 (CDT), Julian Gilbey <J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk> wrote:
> On Tue, May 01, 2001 at 11:45:42AM -0500, Steve Greenland wrote:
> > On 30-Apr-01, 14:33 (CDT), Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho <gaia@iki.fi> wrote:
> > > You could probably do without the latter two, but IIRC the deb format
> > > is internal to dpkg and dpkg-deb is the only supported interface for
> > > creating debs.
> >
> > Not true: .deb files are ar(1) archives containing two tar.gz
> > members. See deb(5). (I suspect that support for signed debs implies
> > more members, but not a change to the basic format.)
>
> AFAIK, ar can't build .debs, even though they use an ar format.
> There's a slight difference in the components.
While admitting that proof by example is not proof, I just used ar to
extract the components from an existing .deb (it turns out there is an
addition file named debian-binary which is a text file that apparently
contains the .deb format version # (currently "2.0\n")), and used
ar to create a new .deb with the same three components. The only requirement
seems to be that they are listed in the right order:
$ ar r ee_1.4.2-3.1_i386.deb debian-binary control.tar.gz data.tar.gz
and then used dpkg-deb to list/extract it, and dpkg to install
it. Worked just fine.
It may be that the (undocumented) debian-binary file is the "slight
difference" you were thinking of.
Hopefully, this will not lead to a removal of dpkg-dev from the
"build-essential" list.
Steve
--
Steve Greenland <stevegr@debian.org>
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