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+.\" dpkg manual page - deb(5)
+.\"
+.\" Copyright © 1995 Raul Miller
+.\" Copyright © 1996 Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
+.\" Copyright © 2000 Wichert Akkerman <wakkerma@debian.org>
+.\" Copyright © 2006-2017 Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>
+.\"
+.\" This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
+.\" it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
+.\" the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
+.\" (at your option) any later version.
+.\"
+.\" This is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
+.\" but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
+.\" MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
+.\" GNU General Public License for more details.
+.\"
+.\" You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
+.\" along with this program. If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
+.
+.TH deb 5 "%RELEASE_DATE%" "%VERSION%" "dpkg suite"
+.nh
+.SH NAME
+deb \- Debian binary package format
+.SH SYNOPSIS
+.IB filename .deb
+.SH DESCRIPTION
+The
+.B .deb
+format is the Debian binary package file format. It is understood
+since dpkg 0.93.76, and is generated by default since dpkg 1.2.0 and
+1.1.1elf (i386/ELF builds).
+.PP
+The format described here is used since Debian 0.93; details of the
+old format are described in
+.BR deb\-old (5).
+.SH FORMAT
+The file is an
+.B ar
+archive with a magic value of
+.BR !<arch> .
+Only the common \fBar\fP archive format is supported, with no long file
+name extensions, but with file names containing an optional trailing
+slash, which limits their length to 15 characters (from the 16 allowed).
+File sizes are limited to 10 ASCII decimal digits, allowing for up to
+approximately 9536.74 MiB member files.
+.PP
+The \fBtar\fP archives currently allowed are, the old-style (v7) format,
+the pre-POSIX ustar format, a subset of the GNU format (new style long
+pathnames and long linknames, supported since dpkg 1.4.1.17; large file
+metadata since dpkg 1.18.24),
+and the POSIX ustar format (long names supported since dpkg 1.15.0).
+Unrecognized tar typeflags are considered an error.
+Each tar entry size inside a tar archive is limited to 11 ASCII octal
+digits, allowing for up to 8 GiB tar entries.
+The GNU large file metadata support permits 95-bit tar entry sizes and
+negative timestamps, and 63-bit UID, GID and device numbers.
+.PP
+The first member is named
+.B debian\-binary
+and contains a series of lines, separated by newlines. Currently only
+one line is present, the format version number,
+.BR 2.0
+at the time this manual page was written.
+Programs which read new-format archives should be prepared for the
+minor number to be increased and new lines to be present, and should
+ignore these if this is the case.
+.PP
+If the major number has changed, an incompatible change has been made
+and the program should stop. If it has not, then the program should
+be able to safely continue, unless it encounters an unexpected member
+in the archive (except at the end), as described below.
+.PP
+The second required member is named
+.BR control.tar .
+It is a tar archive containing the package control information, either
+not compressed (supported since dpkg 1.17.6), or compressed with
+gzip (with \fB.gz\fP extension) or
+xz (with \fB.xz\fP extension, supported since 1.17.6),
+as a series of plain files, of which the file
+.B control
+is mandatory and contains the core control information, the
+.BR conffiles ", " triggers ", " shlibs
+and
+.B symbols
+files contain optional control information, and the
+.BR preinst ", " postinst ", " prerm
+and
+.B postrm
+files are optional maintainer scripts.
+The control tarball may optionally contain an entry for
+.RB ‘ . ’,
+the current directory.
+.PP
+The third, last required member is named
+.BR data.tar .
+It contains the filesystem as a tar archive, either
+not compressed (supported since dpkg 1.10.24), or compressed with
+gzip (with \fB.gz\fP extension),
+xz (with \fB.xz\fP extension, supported since dpkg 1.15.6),
+bzip2 (with \fB.bz2\fP extension, supported since dpkg 1.10.24) or
+lzma (with \fB.lzma\fP extension, supported since dpkg 1.13.25).
+.PP
+These members must occur in this exact order. Current implementations
+should ignore any additional members after
+.BR data.tar .
+Further members may be defined in the future, and (if possible) will be
+placed after these three. Any additional members that may need to be
+inserted after
+.B debian\-binary
+and before
+.B control.tar
+or
+.B data.tar
+and which should be safely ignored by older programs, will have names
+starting with an underscore,
+.RB ‘ _ ’.
+.PP
+Those new members which won't be able to be safely ignored will be
+inserted before
+.B data.tar
+with names starting with something other than underscores, or will
+(more likely) cause the major version number to be increased.
+.SH MEDIA TYPE
+.SS Current
+application/vnd.debian.binary-package
+.SS Deprecated
+application/x-debian-package
+.br
+application/x-deb
+.SH SEE ALSO
+.BR deb\-old (5),
+.BR dpkg\-deb (1),
+.BR deb\-control (5),
+.BR deb\-conffiles (5)
+.BR deb\-triggers (5),
+.BR deb\-shlibs (5),
+.BR deb\-symbols (5),
+.BR deb\-preinst (5),
+.BR deb\-postinst (5),
+.BR deb\-prerm (5),
+.BR deb\-postrm (5).