[solved] reading debian package in windows (deb)

[Zarkon]

Hi,

I am making a windows tool that should read and analyse the contents of a debian package. Is there any standard way (api) to do this? Or should make use of external tools like 7zip?

Greetings

Jos

[ambershark]

Well, debian packages are basically just GNU ar files. So you could get a 3rd party library that can work on ar files.

In linux (or cygwin under windows) you can do:

@
ar x package.deb
@

and that will extract the debian package to it's components.

These would be:

@
debian-binary
control.tar.gz
data.tar.gz
@

To work on those files you will need zlib to decompress the gz, and a tar extraction utility to extract the tar file.

You can find libraries to do all of these with Qt. I don't think it supports tar/ar but I believe qUncompress() can handle gzip data. Not 100% sure about that though, haven't actually tried it, but I know it uses zlib.

[Zarkon]

It seems that zlib is the way to go. Thanks!

[ambershark]

No problem. :) Good luck.