On 01-May-01, 12:19 (CDT), Julian Gilbey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Tue, May 01, 2001 at 11:45:42AM -0500, Steve Greenland wrote: > > On 30-Apr-01, 14:33 (CDT), Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > 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 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (Please do not CC me on mail sent to this list; I subscribe to and read every list I post to.)
