Compressing the archive with gzip or xz and zstd is supported.

control archive - A tar archive named control.tar contains the maintainer scripts and the package meta-information (package name, version, dependencies and maintainer).

debian-binary - A text file named debian-binary containing a single line giving the package format version number.

This archive contains three files in a specific order: Since Debian 0.93, a deb package is implemented as an ar archive. Prior to Debian 0.93, a package consisted of a file header and two concatenated gzip archives. udeb packages are not installable on a standard Debian system, but are used in Debian-Installer.įrhed hex editor displaying the raw data of a Debian package. In particular, documentation files are normally omitted. However, unlike their deb counterparts, udeb packages contain only essential functional files. Although these files use the udeb filename extension, they adhere to the same structure specification as ordinary deb files. Some core Debian packages are available as udebs ('micro debs'), and are typically used only for bootstrapping a Debian installation. ĭebian packages can be converted into other package formats and vice versa using alien, and created from source code using checkinstall or the Debian Package Maker.

Generally end users don't manage packages directly with dpkg but instead use the APT package management software or other APT front-ends such as aptitude ( nCurses) and synaptic ( GTK).

ĭpkg provides the basic functionality for installing and manipulating Debian packages. One archive holds the control information and another contains the installable data. Debian packages are standard Unix ar archives that include two tar archives.

Ubuntu deb