an ar archive containing two tarballs (control.tar.* & data.tar.*) and "debian-binary", which is a version stamp.
In control.tar.gz is a description (./control) and md5sums for the files installed (./md5sums).
So one could more or less duplicate it by installing to $INSTDIR then going
Code: Select all
cd $INSTDIR; find * -type f -exec md5sum '{}' \; | tac > ../md5sums
tar -c * |gzip -9c > ../data.tar.gz
cd ..
#write a file called "control" containing the description
tar -c ./control ./md5sums | gzip -9c >control.tar.gz
echo "2.0" > debian-binary
ar rc new.deb debian-binary control.tar.gz data.tar.gz
Now, is *.pet/pxt/... multiple formats?
Not really. Tar autodetects compression type. So you don't need _any_ new code, apart from mime types.
PS: there is at least one other archiver that could work for packaging: pax.
There's also the SVRx package tools (heirloom packagetools being the relevant port), but _so far_ no one has used those.