CONTENTS

iii

5.8

What are all those directories inside

dists/stable/main

?

. . . . . . . . . . . . 23

5.9

Where is the source code?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

5.10 What's in the

pool

directory?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

5.11 What is  incoming ?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

6 Basics of the Debian package management system

25

6.1

What is a Debian package?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

6.2

What is the format of a Debian binary package?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

6.3

Why are Debian package file names so long?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

6.4

What is a Debian control file?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

6.5

What is a Debian conffile?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

6.6

What is a Debian preinst, postinst, prerm, and postrm script?

. . . . . . . . . . . . 28

6.7

What is an Essential Required, Important, Standard, Optional, or Extra package?

. . 29

6.8

What is a Virtual Package?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

6.9

What is meant by saying that a package Depends, Recommends, Suggests, Conflicts,

Replaces or Provides another package?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

6.10 What is meant by Pre Depends?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

6.11 What is meant by unknown, install, remove purge and hold in the package status?

. 31

6.12 How do I put a package on hold?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

6.13 How do I install a source package?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

6.14 How do I build binary packages from a source package?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

6.15 How do I create Debian packages myself?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

7 The Debian package management tools

35

7.1

What programs does Debian provide for managing its packages?

. . . . . . . . . 35

7.1.1

dpkg

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

7.1.2

APT

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

7.1.3

aptitude

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

7.1.4

dselect

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

7.1.5

Other package management tools

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

7.2

Debian claims to be able to update a running program; how is this accomplished?

41

7.3

How can I tell what packages are already installed on a Debian system?

. . . . . 42

7.4

How can I find out what package produced a particular file?

. . . . . . . . . . . . 42

7.5

Why doesn't get `foo data' removed when I uninstall `foo'?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . 43