The following commit has been merged in the master branch:
commit 170d5f6c9b589cc3282210971dec67660ed89c80
Author: Guillem Jover <guil...@debian.org>
Date: Fri Feb 6 05:06:27 2009 +0200
man: Document in detail the currently supported deb format
Ar member names, types of tar archives and data.tar members.
diff --git a/ChangeLog b/ChangeLog
index f2a8a4a..504ecbd 100644
--- a/ChangeLog
+++ b/ChangeLog
@@ -1,5 +1,10 @@
2009-02-06 Guillem Jover <guil...@debian.org>
+ * man/deb.5: Add detailed information of the currently supported
+ format.
+
+2009-02-06 Guillem Jover <guil...@debian.org>
+
* ostable: Add gnu-kopensolaris.
* triplettable: Add gnu-kopensolaris to kopensolaris mapping.
diff --git a/debian/changelog b/debian/changelog
index 3d8d3be..e5e61a9 100644
--- a/debian/changelog
+++ b/debian/changelog
@@ -57,6 +57,8 @@ dpkg (1.15.0) UNRELEASED; urgency=low
Closes: #505172
* Remove unneeded cpio dependency from dpkg-dev.
* Add kopensolaris support to ostable and triplettable. Closes: #509312
+ * Document in deb.5 in detail the currently supported format, ar member
+ names, types of tar archives and data.tar members.
[ Raphael Hertzog ]
* Enhance dpkg-shlibdeps's error message when a library can't be found to
diff --git a/man/deb.5 b/man/deb.5
index 6a9f654..80e296e 100644
--- a/man/deb.5
+++ b/man/deb.5
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-.TH deb 5 "2006-02-28" "Debian Project" "Debian"
+.TH deb 5 "2009-02-06" "Debian Project" "Debian"
.SH NAME
deb \- Debian binary package format
.SH SYNOPSIS
@@ -16,8 +16,14 @@ old format are described in
.SH FORMAT
The file is an
.B ar
-archive with a magic number of
+archive with a magic value of
.BR !<arch> .
+The file names might contain a trailing slash.
+.PP
+The \fBtar\fP 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).
+Unrecognized tar typeflags are considered an error.
.PP
The first member is named
.B debian-binary
@@ -45,23 +51,27 @@ tarball may optionally contain an entry for
the current directory.
.PP
The third, last required member is named
-.BR data.tar.gz .
-It contains the filesystem archive as a gzipped tar archive.
+.BR data.tar .
+It contains the filesystem as a tar archive, either
+not compressed (supported since dpkg 1.10.24), or compressed with
+gzip (with \fB.gz\fP extension),
+bzip2 (with \fB.bz2\fP extension, supported since dpkg 1.10.24) or
+lzma (with \fB.lzma\fP extension, supported since dpkg 1.13.25).
.PP
These members must occur in this exact order. Current implementations
should ignore any additional members after
-.BR data.tar.gz .
+.BR 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
-.B data.tar.gz
+.B data.tar
and which should be safely ignored by older programs, will have names
starting with an underscore,
.RB ` _ '.
.PP
Those new members which won't be able to be safely ignored will be
inserted before
-.B data.tar.gz
+.B data.tar
with names starting with something other than underscores, or will
(more likely) cause the major version number to be increased.
.SH SEE ALSO
--
dpkg's main repository
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-dpkg-cvs-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
