gdebi rejects a package that dpkg does accept

[Lars Friedrichs]

I have created a deb file by hand. the base was a debuild deb file for hardy and I had to cut down the dependencies (it's a quick and dirty hack, I know!) to make it work with feisty and gutsy. I am the upstream author, I know it works with the lower deps.
So I have unpacked the old package with
ar x xxx.deb
untar'ed the control.tar.gz with
tar xvzf control.tar.gz
and have changed the control file by hand.
I did a
sudo chown root.root *
to make all files owned by root and recreated the control.tar.gz by
rm control.tar.gz
sudo tar cvzf control.tar.gz postinst prerm md5sums control
afterwards I changed the deb file via
ar r xxx.deb control.tar.gz
the resulting file can be installed via dpkg without a problem. Gdebi tells me it is either not readable or corrupt.

[Lars Friedrichs (l-friedrichs)]

Here is the file in question

[Lars Friedrichs (l-friedrichs)]

Forgot to mention - I have Feisty running here...

[Michael Bienia (geser)]

That also happens on hardy.
I digged through GDebi's code to understand where and why it happened and got to line 49 in DebPackage.py.

$ python -c "import apt_inst; control = apt_inst.debExtractControl(open('blueproximity_1.2.4-0ubuntu1~feisty1_all.deb'))"
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
SystemError: E:This is not a valid DEB archive, missing 'debian-binary' member

So it looks like the deb is broken.

[Andy Balcombe (andy-balcombe)]

I think the invalid deb package is caused by the use of "ar" to build the deb file. See this post for more info.
http://wilmer.gaast.net/blog/archives/3-.deb-files-are-ar-archives,-but-....html

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Thanks for your bugreport.

This is a bug in libapt and its fixed in the jaunty version of apt.