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Packages generally contain all of the files necessary to implement a set of related commands or features. There are two types of Debian packages:
Binary packages, which contain executables, configuration files, man/info pages, copyright information, and other documentation. These packages are distributed in a Debian-specific archive format (see What is the format of a Debian binary package?, Section 6.2); they are usually distinguished by having a '.deb' file extension. Binary packages can be unpacked using the Debian utility dpkg; details are given in its manual page.
Source packages, which consist of a .dsc file describing the source package (including the names of the following files), a .orig.tar.gz file that contains the original unmodified source in gzip-compressed tar format and usually a .diff.gz file that contains the Debian-specific changes to the original source. The utility dpkg-source packs and unpacks Debian source archives; details are provided in its manual page.
Installation of software by the package system uses "dependencies"
which are carefully designed by the package maintainers. These dependencies
are documented in the control file associated with each package.
For example, the package containing the GNU C compiler (gcc)
"depends" on the package binutils which includes the
linker and assembler. If a user attempts to install gcc without
having first installed binutils, the package management system
(dpkg) will send an error message that it also needs binutils, and
stop installing gcc. (However, this facility can be overridden by
the insistent user, see dpkg(8).) See more in What is meant by saying that a package Depends,
Recommends, Suggests, Conflicts, Replaces
or Provides another package?, Section 6.9 below.
Debian's packaging tools can be used to:
manipulate and manage packages or parts of packages,
aid the user in the break-up of packages that must be transmitted through a limited-size medium such as floppy disks,
aid developers in the construction of package archives, and
aid users in the installation of packages which reside on a remote FTP site.
A Debian "package", or a Debian archive file, contains the executable files, libraries, and documentation associated with a particular suite of program or set of related programs. Normally, a Debian archive file has a filename that ends in .deb.
The internals of this Debian binary packages format are described in the
deb(5) manual page. This internal format is subject to change
(between major releases of Debian GNU/Linux), therefore please always use
dpkg-deb(1) for manipulating .deb files.
The Debian binary package file names conform to the following convention: <foo>_<VersionNumber>-<DebianRevisionNumber>.deb
Note that foo is supposed to be the package name. As a check, one can learn the package name associated with a particular Debian archive file (.deb file) in one of these ways:
inspect the "Packages" file in the directory where it was stored at a Debian FTP archive site. This file contains a stanza describing each package; the first field in each stanza is the formal package name.
use the command dpkg --info foo_VVV-RRR.deb (where VVV and RRR are the version and revision of the package in question, respectively). This displays, among other things, the package name corresponding to the archive file being unpacked.
The VVV component is the version number specified by the upstream developer. There are no standards in place here, so the version number may have formats as different as "19990513" and "1.3.8pre1".
The RRR component is the Debian revision number, and is specified by the Debian developer (or an individual user if he chooses to build the package himself). This number corresponds to the revision level of the Debian package, thus, a new revision level usually signifies changes in the Debian Makefile (debian/rules), the Debian control file (debian/control), the installation or removal scripts (debian/p*), or in the configuration files used with the package.
Specifics regarding the contents of a Debian control file are provided in the Debian Policy Manual, section 5, see What other documentation exists on and for a Debian system?, Section 11.1.
Briefly, a sample control file is shown below for the Debian package hello:
Package: hello
Priority: optional
Section: devel
Installed-Size: 45
Maintainer: Adam Heath <doogie@debian.org>
Architecture: i386
Version: 1.3-16
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.1)
Description: The classic greeting, and a good example
The GNU hello program produces a familiar, friendly greeting. It
allows nonprogrammers to use a classic computer science tool which
would otherwise be unavailable to them.
.
Seriously, though: this is an example of how to do a Debian package.
It is the Debian version of the GNU Project's `hello world' program
(which is itself an example for the GNU Project).
The Package field gives the package name. This is the name by which the package can be manipulated by the package tools, and usually similar to but not necessarily the same as the first component string in the Debian archive file name.
The Version field gives both the upstream developer's version number and (in the last component) the revision level of the Debian package of this program as explained in Why are Debian package file names so long?, Section 6.3.
The Architecture field specifies the chip for which this particular binary was compiled.
The Depends field gives a list of packages that have to be installed in order to install this package successfully.
The Installed-Size indicates how much disk space the installed package will consume. This is intended to be used by installation front-ends in order to show whether there is enough disk space available to install the program.
The Section line gives the "section" where this Debian package is stored at the Debian FTP sites. This is the name of a subdirectory (within one of the main directories, see What are all those directories at the Debian FTP archives?, Section 5.1) where the package is stored.
The Priority indicates how important is this package for installation, so that semi-intelligent software like dselect or console-apt can sort the package into a category of e.g. packages optionally installed. See What is an Essential Required, Important, Standard, Optional, or Extra package?, Section 6.7.
The Maintainer field gives the e-mail address of the person who is currently responsible for maintaining this package.
The Description field gives a brief summary of the package's features.
For more information about all possible fields a package can have, please see the Debian Policy Manual, section 5., "Control files and their fields".
Conffiles is a list of configuration files (usually placed in /etc) that the package management system will not overwrite when the package is upgraded. This ensures that local values for the contents of these files will be preserved, and is a critical feature enabling the in-place upgrade of packages on a running system.
To determine exactly which files are preserved during an upgrade, run:
dpkg --status package
And look under "Conffiles:".
These files are executable scripts which are automatically run before or after a package is installed. Along with a file named control, all of these files are part of the "control" section of a Debian archive file.
The individual files are:
This script executes before that package will be unpacked from its Debian archive (".deb") file. Many 'preinst' scripts stop services for packages which are being upgraded until their installation or upgrade is completed (following the successful execution of the 'postinst' script).
This script typically completes any required configuration of the package foo once foo has been unpacked from its Debian archive (".deb") file. Often, 'postinst' scripts ask the user for input, and/or warn the user that if he accepts default values, he should remember to go back and re-configure that package as the situation warrants. Many 'postinst' scripts then execute any commands necessary to start or restart a service once a new package has been installed or upgraded.
This script typically stops any daemons which are associated with a package. It is executed before the removal of files associated with the package.
This script typically modifies links or other files associated with foo, and/or removes files created by the package. (Also see What is a Virtual Package?, Section 6.8.)
Currently all of the control files can be found in directory /var/lib/dpkg/info. The files relevant to package foo begin with the name "foo" and have file extensions of "preinst", "postinst", etc., as appropriate. The file foo.list in that directory lists all of the files that were installed with the package foo. (Note that the location of these files is a dpkg internal; you should not rely on it.)
Each Debian package is assigned a priority by the distribution maintainers, as an aid to the package management system. The priorities are:
Required: packages that are necessary for the proper functioning of the system.
This includes all tools that are necessary to repair system defects. You must not remove these packages or your system may become totally broken and you may probably not even be able to use dpkg to put things back. Systems with only the Required packages are probably unusable, but they do have enough functionality to allow the sysadmin to boot and install more software.
Important packages should be found on any Unix-like system.
Other packages which the system will not run well or be usable without will be here. This does NOT include Emacs or X11 or TeX or any other large applications. These packages only constitute the bare infrastructure.
Standard packages are standard on any Linux system, including a reasonably small but not too limited character-mode system. Tools are included to be able to browse the web (using w3m), send e-mail (with mutt) and download files from FTP servers.
This is what will install by default if users do not select anything else. It does not include many large applications, but it does include the Python interpreter and some server software like OpenSSH (for remote administration), Exim (for mail delivery, although it can be configured for local delivery only), an identd server (pidentd) and the RPC portmapper (portmap). It also includes some common generic documentation that most users will find helpful.
Optional packages include all those that you might reasonably want to install if you did not know what it was, or do not have specialized requirements.
This includes X11, a full TeX distribution, and lots of applications.
Extra: packages that either conflict with others with higher priorities, are only likely to be useful if you already know what they are, or have specialized requirements that make them unsuitable for "Optional".
If you do a default Debian installation all the packages of priority Standard or higher will be installed in your system. If you select pre-defined tasks you will get lower priority packages too.
Additionally, some packages are marked as Essential since they are absolutely necessary for the proper functioning of the system. The package management tools will refuse to remove these.
A virtual package is a generic name that applies to any one of a group of packages, all of which provide similar basic functionality. For example, both the tin and trn programs are news readers, and should therefore satisfy any dependency of a program that required a news reader on a system, in order to work or to be useful. They are therefore both said to provide the "virtual package" called news-reader.
Similarly, smail and sendmail both provide the functionality of a mail transport agent. They are therefore said to provide the virtual package, "mail transport agent". If either one is installed, then any program depending on the installation of a mail-transport-agent will be satisfied by the existence of this virtual package.
Debian provides a mechanism so that, if more than one package which provide the same virtual package is installed on a system, then system administrators can set one as the preferred package. The relevant command is update-alternatives, and is described further in Some users like mawk, others like gawk; some like vim, others like elvis; some like trn, others like tin; how does Debian support diversity?, Section 10.10.
The Debian package system has a range of package "dependencies" which are designed to indicate (in a single flag) the level at which Program A can operate independently of the existence of Program B on a given system:
Package A depends on Package B if B absolutely must be installed in order to run A. In some cases, A depends not only on B, but on a version of B. In this case, the version dependency is usually a lower limit, in the sense that A depends on any version of B more recent than some specified version.
Package A recommends Package B, if the package maintainer judges that most users would not want A without also having the functionality provided by B.
Package A suggests Package B if B contains files that are related to (and usually enhance) the functionality of A.
Package A conflicts with Package B when A will not operate if B is installed on the system. Most often, conflicts are cases where A contains files which are an improvement over those in B. "Conflicts" are often combined with "replaces".
Package A replaces Package B when files installed by B are removed and (in some cases) over-written by files in A.
Package A provides Package B when all of the files and functionality of B are incorporated into A. This mechanism provides a way for users with constrained disk space to get only that part of package A which they really need.
More detailed information on the use of each these terms can be found in the Policy manual.
"Pre-Depends" is a special dependency. In the case of most packages, dpkg will unpack its archive file (i.e., its .deb file) independently of whether or not the files on which it depends exist on the system. Simplistically, unpacking means that dpkg will extract the files from the archive file that were meant to be installed on your file system, and put them in place. If those packages depend on the existence of some other packages on your system, dpkg will refuse to complete the installation (by executing its "configure" action) until the other packages are installed.
However, for some packages, dpkg will refuse even to unpack them until certain dependencies are resolved. Such packages are said to "Pre-depend" on the presence of some other packages. The Debian project provided this mechanism to support the safe upgrading of systems from a.out format to ELF format, where the order in which packages were unpacked was critical. There are other large upgrade situations where this method is useful, e.g. the packages with the required priority and their LibC dependency.
As before, more detailed information about this can be found in the Policy manual.
These "want" flags tell what the user wanted to do with a package (as indicated either by the user's actions in the "Select" section of dselect, or by the user's direct invocations of dpkg).
Their meanings are:
unknown - the user has never indicated whether he wants the package
install - the user wants the package installed or upgraded
remove - the user wants the package removed, but does not want to remove any existing configuration files.
purge - the user wants the package to be removed completely, including its configuration files.
hold - the user wants this package not to be processed, i.e., he wants to keep the current version with the current status whatever that is.
There are three ways of holding back packages, with dpkg, aptitude or with dselect.
With dpkg, you just have to export the list of package selections, with:
dpkg --get-selections \* > selections.txt
Then edit the resulting file selections.txt, change the line
containing the package you wish to hold, e.g. libc6, from this:
libc6 install
to this:
libc6 hold
Save the file, and reload it into dpkg database with:
dpkg --set-selections < selections.txt
With aptitude, you can hold a package using
aptitude hold package_name
and remove the hold with
aptitude unhold package_name
With dselect, you just have to enter the [S]elect screen, find the package you wish to hold in its present state, and press the `=' key (or `H'). The changes will go live immediately after you exit the [S]elect screen.
Debian source packages can't actually be "installed", they are just unpacked in whatever directory you want to build the binary packages they produce.
Source packages are distributed on most of the same mirrors where you can
obtain the binary packages. If you set up your APT's
sources.list(5) to include the appropriate "deb-src"
lines, you'll be able to easily download any source packages by running
apt-get source foo
To help you in actually building the source package, Debian source package provide the so-called build-dependencies mechanism. This means that the source package maintainer keeps a list of other packages that are required to build their package. To see how this is useful, run
apt-get build-dep foo
before building the source.
You will need all of foo_*.dsc, foo_*.tar.gz and foo_*.diff.gz to compile the source (note: there is no .diff.gz for some packages that are native to Debian).
Once you have them (How do I install a source package?,
Section 6.13), if you have the dpkg-dev package installed, the
following command:
dpkg-source -x foo_version-revision.dsc
will extract the package into a directory called foo-version.
If you want just to compile the package, you may cd into foo-version directory and issue the command
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b
to build the package (note that this also requires the fakeroot
package), and then
dpkg -i ../foo_version-revision_arch.deb
to install the newly-built package(s).
For more detailed description on this, read the New Maintainers' Guide,
available in the maint-guide package, or at http://www.debian.org/doc/devel-manuals#maint-guide.
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The Debian GNU/Linux FAQ
version 3.1.5, 17 January 2007