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Debian Packaging from First Principles

I've used Debian as my distro of choice for well over a decade and whilst I've become familiar with "using" Debian I've never really understood how it worked under the hood. In this post I aim to uncover what exactly is a .deb file, what it contains and how one works.

Now we’ve created the three member files described by the first man page, we can use the ar command to bundle them together to build our final deb package. To simplify the repeated building of the deb and its member files, I wrapped up the process in a small, hand-rolled, Makefile. My plan for the next few blog posts is to iterate on this project to understand more about deb files and apt tooling, first getting to grips with dependencies.

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