Como un administrador de un sistema Debian generalmente manejará paquetes .deb ya que contienen unidades funcionales consistentes (aplicaciones, documentación, etc.) facilitando su instalación y mantenimiento. Por lo tanto, es buena idea saber qué son y cómo utilizarlos.
Este capítulo describe la estructura y los contenidos de paquetes «binarios» y «fuente». Los primeros son archivos .deb para utilizar directamente con dpkg mientras que los últimos contienen el código fuente así como las instrucciones para crear los paquetes binarios.
5.1. Estructura de un paquete binario
The Debian package format is designed so that its content may be extracted on any Unix system that has the classic commands ar, tar, and xz (sometimes gzip or bzip2). This seemingly trivial property is important for portability and disaster recovery.
Imagine, for example, that you mistakenly deleted the
dpkg program, and that you could thus no longer install Debian packages.
dpkg being a Debian package itself, it would seem your system would be done for... Fortunately, you know the format of a package and can therefore download the
.deb file of the
dpkg package and install it manually (see sidebar
HERRAMIENTAS dpkg, APT y ar). If by some misfortune one or more of the programs
ar,
tar or
gzip/
xz/
bzip2 have disappeared, you will only need to copy the missing program from another system (since each of these operates in a completely autonomous manner, without dependencies, a simple copy will suffice). If your system suffered some even more outrageous fortune, and even these don't work (maybe the deepest system libraries are missing?), you should try the static version of
busybox (provided in the
busybox-static package), which is even more self-contained, and provides subcommands such as
busybox ar,
busybox tar and
busybox xz.
Estos son los contenidos de un archivo .deb:
$ ar t dpkg_1.18.24_amd64.deb
debian-binary
control.tar.gz
data.tar.xz
$ ar x dpkg_1.18.24_amd64.deb
$ ls
control.tar.gz data.tar.xz debian-binary dpkg_1.18.24_amd64.deb
$ tar tJf data.tar.xz | head -n 15
./
./etc/
./etc/alternatives/
./etc/alternatives/README
./etc/cron.daily/
./etc/cron.daily/dpkg
./etc/dpkg/
./etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg
./etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/
./etc/logrotate.d/
./etc/logrotate.d/dpkg
./sbin/
./sbin/start-stop-daemon
./usr/
./usr/bin/
$ tar tzf control.tar.gz
./
./conffiles
./postinst
./md5sums
./prerm
./control
./postrm
$ cat debian-binary
2.0
Como puede ver, el compendio ar de un paquete Debian contiene tres archivos:
debian-binary. This is a text file which simply indicates the version of the .deb file used (in 2017: version 2.0).
control.tar.gz. Este compendio contiene toda la metainformación disponible, como el nombre y la versión del paquete. Alguna de esta metainformación le permite a las herramientas de gestión de paquetes determinar si es posible instalar o desinstalarlo, por ejemplo según la lista de paquetes que ya se encuentran en el equipo.
data.tar.xz. This archive contains all of the files to be extracted from the package; this is where the executable files, documentation, etc., are all stored. Some packages may use other compression formats, in which case the file will be named differently (data.tar.bz2 for bzip2, data.tar.gz for gzip).
