dpkg

DEB files are mainly manipulable through the low-level tool dpkg . It is responsible for installing, updating, managing, ...DEB packages (dselect and APT rely on it). Actually, the core part of dpkg is dpkg-deb , which can build and extract content from DEB packages.

It is interesting to study the source code of this latter tool. The function do_build in build.c is responsible for creating a package. Let's try to understand how it works.