On Tue, May 01, 2001 at 01:50:49PM -0500, Steve Greenland wrote:
> > 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.
I stand corrected. Incidentally, the debian-binary component is
discussed in deb(5).
> It may be that the (undocumented) debian-binary file is the "slight
> difference" you were thinking of.
Nope. I noticed an extra component, but that may have been to do with
the options I used. Note that there is a slash (/) appended to the
filenames when ar is used but not when dpkg-deb is used. This seems
to be unimportant, however.
> Hopefully, this will not lead to a removal of dpkg-dev from the
> "build-essential" list.
;-)
Julian
--
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Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, Queen Mary, Univ. of London
Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see http://people.debian.org/~jdg
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