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dpkg technical manual

Abstract

This document describes the minimum necessary workings for the APT dselect replacement. It gives an overall specification of what its external interface must look like for compatibility, and also gives details of some internal quirks.

Copyright Notice

Copyright © Tom Lees, 1997.

APT and this document are free software; you can redistribute them and/or modify them under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

For more details, on Debian systems, see the file /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL for the full license.

Contents

• 1 Quick summary of dpkg's external interface
  • 1.1 Control files
  • 1.2 The dpkg status area
  • 1.3 The dpkg library files
  • 1.4 The "dpkg" command-line utility
• 2 dpkg-deb and .deb file internals
  • 2.1 The .deb archive format
  • 2.2 The dpkg-deb command-line
• 3 dpkg internals
  • 3.1 Updates
  • 3.2 What happens when dpkg reads the database
  • 3.3 How dpkg compares version numbers

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dpkg technical manual