poka.sh

 Docs

DEB

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Debian Package Preview.

At a glance
Purpose A Debian binary package: an ar archive holding debian-binary, control.tar and data.tar.
Extensions .deb
Poka parser poka-deb
Viewer poka-tree-viewer
Depth tier Parser with a shared viewer (see Depth tiers)
Breadth tier B4 Summary (see Breadth tiers)

How much Poka reads

B4 Summary. The container and metadata are read and summarised (counts, properties, structure), but the main content is not rendered.

Confidence: medium (the reviewer read the code). Basis: Reviewed 2026-10-26: read parsers/poka-deb/src/main.rs (739 lines) and plugin.json. The three unit tests cover the member walk and a member running past the end; corpus_debs_have_every_member_inside_the_file runs hello_2.12.3-1_amd64.deb and python3-six_1.17.0-3_all.deb through that check, not through the field and file listing. Covers .deb, .udeb and .ddeb. The tree decompresses control.tar and data.tar (gzip, xz, zstd or none) and shows the control fields Package, Version, Architecture, Maintainer, Installed-Size, Section, Priority, Depends and the first line of Description, the installed files as a directory tree, and the ar members. Judgement: B4: the package metadata and file list are shown, but no installed file is.

What Poka does not read

  • Installed file contents are not shown
  • Control fields other than the nine listed are not shown (Pre-Depends, Recommends, Suggests, Conflicts, Provides, Replaces, Homepage, Source and the long description)
  • Maintainer scripts, md5sums and conffiles in control.tar are not shown
  • bzip2- and lzma-compressed members are not read
  • Only the first 3,000 installed paths are listed; members over 48 MiB decompressed and files over 64 MiB are cut

Libraries

Libraries Poka uses or has assessed for this format, with the status, licence and language the registry records.

  • flate2 (used; MIT OR Apache-2.0; Rust)
  • lzma-rs (used; MIT; Rust)
  • ruzstd (used; MIT; Rust)
  • debpkg (candidate; MIT; Rust; https://github.com/schultetwin1/debpkg) — Streaming read-only parser for binary .deb (format version 2.0 only); v0.6.0 (May 2022)
  • debian-packaging (candidate; MPL-2.0; Rust; https://github.com/indygreg/linux-packaging-rs) — Parses control files and repository metadata and reads/writes .deb files; v0.18.0 (Nov 2024); part is still work in progress
  • deb-rust (reference; GPL-3.0-or-later; Rust; https://codeberg.org/notsludgebomb/deb-rust) — copyleft; Pure Rust reader/writer for binary Deb packages; v0.1.2 (Feb 2023)

Sources

  • parsers/poka-deb/src/main.rs
  • parsers/poka-deb/plugin.json