Section 5: deb
This page was been converted automatically, from Debian GNU/Linux
man pages.
DEB(5) Debian GNU/Linux DEB(5)
NAME
deb - Debian GNU/Linux binary package format
SYNOPSIS
filename.deb
DESCRIPTION
The .deb format is the Debian binary package file format.
It is understood by dpkg 0.93.76 and later, and is gener-
ated by default by all versions of dpkg since 1.2.0 and
all i386/ELF versions since 1.1.1elf.
The format described here is used since Debian 0.93;
details of the old format are described in deb-old(5).
FORMAT
The file is an ar archive with a magic number of !.
The first member is named debian-binary and contains a
series of lines, separated by newlines. Currently only
one line is present, the format version number, 2.0 at the
time this manual page was written. Programs which read
new-format archives should be prepared for the minor num-
ber to be increased and new lines to be present, and
should ignore these if this is the case.
If the major number has changed, an incompatible change
has been made and the program should stop. If it has not,
then the program should be able to safely continue, unless
it encounters an unexpected member in the archive (except
at the end), as described below.
The second required member is named control.tar.gz . It
is a gzipped tar archive containing the package control
information, as a series of plain files, of which the file
control is mandatory and contains the core control infor-
mation. Please see the Debian Packaging Manual, section
2.2 for details of these files. The control tarball may
optionally contain an entry for `.', the current direc-
tory.
The third, last required member is named data.tar.gz . It
contains the filesystem archive as a gzipped tar archive.
These members must occur in this exact order. Current
implementations should ignore any additional members after
data.tar.gz. Further members may be defined in the
future, and (if possible) will be placed after these
three. Any additional members that may need to be inserted
before data.tar.gz and which should be safely ignored by
older programs, will have names starting with an under-
score, `_'.
Those new members which won't be able to be safely ignored
Debian Project January 2000 1
DEB(5) Debian GNU/Linux DEB(5)
will be inserted before data.tar.gz with names starting
with something other than underscores, or will (more
likely) cause the major version number to be increased.
SEE ALSO
deb(5), dpkg-deb(8), deb-control(5), Debian Packaging Man-
ual.
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