[Techtalk] apt-get hell?

[Colleen Hatfield]

On Apr 1, 2005 5:34 PM, Mary <mary-linuxchix at puzzling.org> wrote:

> My suggestion would be to extract files from the file-rc deb file
> directly and just unpack them. Later, you can install the package over
> the top of those files so that it gets upgraded etc as normal.
> 
> .deb files are, I think, cpio files containing gzipped tar files full of
> the actual files to be installed. So you can unpack them using those
> tools. I'd consider trying the 'alien' command first though.

If the goal is only to get certain files out of a package, it might be
better to just get the source to begin with rather than trying to
extract it from a .deb.  Doing an "apt-get source file-rc" will get
you the source files for the file-rc package; you can use
dpkg-buildpackage to build a .deb locally from these source files
later if you want.

- Colleen