This chapter describes the structure and contents of “binary” and “source” packages. The former are files directly usable by dpkg, while the latter contain the source code, as well as instructions for building binary packages. The Debian package format is designed so that its content may be extracted on any Unix system that has the classic commands ar, tar, and xz or sometimes gzip or bzip2. If your system suffered some even more outrageous fortune, and even these don't work (maybe the deepest system libraries are missing?), you should try the static version of busybox (provided in the busybox-static package), which is even more self-contained, and provides subcommands such as busybox ar, busybox tar and busybox xz.

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