Debeasy

A really easy way to read the properties of a Debian/Ubuntu (DEB format) package file. In this way, it's the Debian/Ubuntu companion to jordansissel's arr-pm gem.

require 'debeasy'
pkg = Debeasy.read("/path/to/package.deb")
puts pkg.architecture
=> x86_64

All the attributes are the same ones you'd get from aptitude show, except for the purposes of access hyphens (-) get replaced with underscores (_), and everything is lowercased.

To see the available fields on a package, do:

require 'debeasy'
pkg = Debeasy.read("/path/to/package.deb")
puts pkg.fields

You can read a field either by calling the method with the field name, or by using hash access syntax:

# Equivalent
pkg.installed_size
pkg["installed_size"]

You can also read the preinst, prerm, postinst, and postrm scripts from the package:

pkg.preinst_contents
pkg.prerm_contents
pkg.postinst_contents
pkg.postrm_contents

You can read the entire filelist of a package:

pkg.filelist

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'debeasy'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install debeasy

You may (read: will) run into problems getting the libarchive gem to install on Mac OS X. The way to fix this seems to be to tell bundler to supply an option to the libarchive build process so it can find libarchive.h.

First install libarchive with brew:

brew install libarchive

Now configure bundler:

bundle config build.libarchive "--with-opt-dir=/usr/local/opt/libarchive"

Now do bundle install as normal.

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request