Manipulating .debs

["Stig Are M. Botterli" <samb@mo.himolde.no>]

I wanted to remove a dependency from a debian package. I took it apart and
edited the control-file, and put it back together. However, dpkg wouldn't
recognize it as a debian package. 'file' reports it as a "current ar
archive", while it reports the original .deb as a Debian binary package. So
the question is, how do I 'brand' (ie give it the correct magic number) my
manipulated .deb-file as a debian package?

In this particular case I found that building a dummy equiv .deb for
the package I didn't want installed on my system to be a better solution
anyway.