How to see if a .deb package inserts a repository

debpackage-management

On Xubuntu 16.04, I want to install the latest Virtualbox package. I know that I could install it through APT and receive updates through the Ubuntu repositories, or I could add a PPA (if there was one) and receive it from there.

At this link I can either download the package or add it to sources.list and install it: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads

But I would rather install the latest package by downloading it from their website. I if ran "dpkg -i install packagename", it would install the package, but would it add a new repository from which I would receive updates whenever I ran "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade"? Can I somehow check if the package contains such a repository?

Best Answer

It's not fool-proof, but this will give a good indication:

dpkg-deb -c virtualbox-5.1_5.1.12-112440\~Debian\~stretch_amd64.deb|grep etc/apt

In this case nothing is found, so it looks like the package doesn't add a repository.

We're specifically looking for files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d. It's not fool-proof because packages could add a repository in their postinst. You can examine the latter using

dpkg-deb --ctrl-tarfile virtualbox-5.1_5.1.12-112440\~Debian\~stretch_amd64.deb|tar xf - ./postinst

then reading the extracted postinst (which confirms that the package doesn't add a repository).

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Ubuntu – Is it safe to manually perform ‘apt-get update’ ‘s operation

This sounds like it may work, but personally, I'd just use apt-offline.

From the manpage:

apt-offline brings offline package management functionality to Debian based system. It can be used to download packages and its dependencies to be installed later on (or required to update) a disconnected machine. Packages can be downloaded from a different connected machine.

Excerpt from Debian Administration:

Using apt-offline:

You generate a signature on your Debian box at home and carry the signature file on a removable medium
Now you take the USB Stick (with the apt-offline.txt signature file) to the office machine which could be running any linux version or even Windows.
There, you could run apt-offline giving it the signature file.
apt-offline would generate you an archive file or a folder with all the data. That data can be copied on a removable media. The removable media can be attached back to the disconnected Debian box at home and installed. (e.g. "apt-offline install /tmp/apt-offline.zip")

Debian: Updating package with PPA fails with error “gpg: no valid OpenPGP data found”

This doesn’t answer your question as stated, but it will give you a packaged version of Audacious 3.10 on Debian 9. Here’s how to rebuild the current Buster package on Debian 9:

enable Stretch backports, which we’ll need

echo deb http://deb.debian.org/debian stretch-backports main | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/stretch-backports.list
sudo apt update

install some useful tools we’ll need
```
sudo apt install devscripts
```
switch to a temporary directory
```
cd /tmp
```

download the source packages

dget -xu http://deb.debian.org/debian/pool/main/a/audacious/audacious_3.10-1.dsc
dget -xu http://deb.debian.org/debian/pool/main/a/audacious-plugins/audacious-plugins_3.10-1.dsc

start building Audacious
```
cd audacious-3.10
```
build a meta-package with the build-dependencies (this will allow us to clean up later)
```
mk-build-deps debian/control
```

install it then move it out of the way

sudo apt install ./audacious-build-deps_3.10-1_all.deb
mv audacious-build-deps_3.10-1_all.deb ..

now build Audacious
```
dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc
```

install packages we’ll need to build the Audacious plugins (we can’t install Audacious on its own without those)

cd ..
sudo dpkg -i audacious-dev_3.10-1_amd64.deb libaudcore5_3.10-1_amd64.deb libaudgui5_3.10-1_amd64.deb libaudtag3_3.10-1_amd64.deb

same process to build the plugins (with an upgrade of debhelper to the Stretch backports version, required here)

cd audacious-plugins-3.10
mk-build-deps debian/control
sudo apt install -t stretch-backports debhelper
sudo apt install ./audacious-plugins-build-deps_3.10-1_amd64.deb
mv audacious-plugins-build-deps_3.10-1_amd64.deb ..
dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc

The build is complicated by the inter-dependencies between Audacious and its plugins, which is why you need to build Audacious first, the install its libraries and development package, then build the plugins. Once all that’s done you can install Audacious itself using the resulting package:

cd ..
sudo dpkg -i audacious_3.10-1_amd64.deb audacious-plugins_3.10-1_amd64.deb audacious-plugins-data_3.10-1_all.deb

To clean up the packages using during the build:

sudo apt purge audacious-dev build-essential debhelper devscripts gcc gcc-6 audacious-build-deps audacious-plugins-build-deps
sudo apt --purge autoremove

Best Answer

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Debian: Updating package with PPA fails with error “gpg: no valid OpenPGP data found”

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