Chapter B. Binary packages (from old Packaging Manual)

108

file (see `The main control information file:

control

' on the next page).

The

DEBIAN

directory will not appear in the file system archive of the package, and so won't

be installed by

dpkg

when the package is installed.

When you've prepared the package, you should invoke:

dpkg   build

directory

This will build the package in

directory

.deb

. (

dpkg

knows that

  build

is a

dpkg deb

option, so it invokes

dpkg deb

with the same arguments to build the package.)

See the man page

dpkg deb(8)

for details of how to examine the contents of this newly 

created file. You may find the output of following commands enlightening:

dpkg deb   info

filename

.deb

dpkg deb   contents

filename

.deb

dpkg   contents

filename

.deb

To view the copyright file for a package you could use this command:

dpkg   fsys tarfile

filename

.deb | tar xO ./usr/share/doc/\*/copyright | pager

B.2 Package control information files

The control information portion of a binary package is a collection of files with names known

to

dpkg

. It will treat the contents of these files specially   some of them contain information

used by

dpkg

when installing or removing the package; others are scripts which the package

maintainer wants

dpkg

to run.

It is possible to put other files in the package control area, but this is not generally a good idea

(though they will largely be ignored).

Here is a brief list of the control info files supported by

dpkg

and a summary of what they're

used for.

control

This is the key description file used by

dpkg

. It specifies the package's name and

version, gives its description for the user, states its relationships with other packages, and

so forth. See `Source package control files  

debian/control

' on page

28

and `Binary

package control files  

DEBIAN/control

' on page

28

.

It is usually generated automatically from information in the source package by the

dpkg gencontrol

program, and with assistance from

dpkg shlibdeps

. See `Tools

for processing source packages' on page

111

.