NAME¶
deb - Debian 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 generated 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).
The file is an
ar archive with a magic value of
!<arch>.
Only the common
ar archive format is supported, with no long file name
extensions, but with file names containing an optional trailing slash, which
limits their length to 15 characters (from the 16 allowed). File sizes are
limited to 10 ASCII decimal digits, allowing for up to approximately 9536.74
MiB member files.
The
tar archives currently allowed are, the old-style (v7) format, the
pre-POSIX ustar format, a subset of the GNU format (only the new style long
pathnames and long linknames, supported since dpkg 1.4.1.17), and the POSIX
ustar format (long names supported since dpkg 1.15.0). Unrecognized tar
typeflags are considered an error.
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 number 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 information. The control tarball may optionally contain an entry for
`
.', the current directory.
The third, last required member is named
data.tar. It contains the
filesystem as a tar archive, either not compressed (supported since dpkg
1.10.24), or compressed with gzip (with
.gz extension), xz (with
.xz extension, supported since dpkg 1.15.6), bzip2 (with
.bz2
extension, supported since dpkg 1.10.24) or lzma (with
.lzma extension,
supported since dpkg 1.13.25).
These members must occur in this exact order. Current implementations should
ignore any additional members after
data.tar. 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 and
which should be safely ignored by older programs, will have names starting
with an underscore, `
_'.
Those new members which won't be able to be safely ignored will be inserted
before
data.tar with names starting with something other than
underscores, or will (more likely) cause the major version number to be
increased.
SEE ALSO¶
deb-old(5),
dpkg-deb(1),
deb-control(5).