Re: DEITY TEAM: Minor query re: .deb format
On Thu, Apr 17, 1997 at 02:53:12PM -0400, Raymond A. Ingles wrote:
> Just out of curiosity, why did Debian decide to use a .deb package
> format, as opposed to, say, a "debian_control" file inside the .tar
> archive? So far as I can see:
>
> CONS:
> Cannnot use the Debianized package without dpkg.
> Difficult to "unDebianize".
Not at all; I quite often extract debian packages by hand on
non-debian systems to get documentation etc. The .deb is an ar
archive, containing some .tar files. Use "ar x <filename.deb>"
to extract the internal stuff.
> Using the universally (well, Unixversally) supported .tar standard has
> only one con that I can see - you have to at least use "tar -t" to see if
> the package has been Debianized. This seems a small price to pay to avoid
> the other disadvantages.
Same story with Redhat. Slackware uses .tgz, but there are basically
no packages available except the standard distribution, and they're
just a big of control info added -- not a lot different to Debian,
really.
Hamish
--
Hamish Moffatt, StudIEAust moffatt@yallara.cs.rmit.edu.au
Student, computer science & computer systems engineering. 3rd year, RMIT.
http://yallara.cs.rmit.edu.au/~moffatt (PGP key here) CPOM: [**** ] 40%
--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
debian-user-request@lists.debian.org .
Trouble? e-mail to templin@bucknell.edu .
Reply to: