Anyone good with dpkg/apt

[Michael ODonnell]

It's sometimes handy to know that a .deb is really just
an archive in ar format; the morbidly curious might find
it interesting to do the following:

   ar tv somePackage.deb               # What's in the .deb ?
   mkdir              /tmp/hackery
   cp somePackage.deb /tmp/hackery
   cd                 /tmp/hackery
   ar xv somePackage.deb
   for f in *gz ; do tar tzf $f ; done # What's in the enclosed tarballs?
   for f in *gz ; do tar xzf $f ; done

...after which (IIRC) all the packaged files and all the
various scripts (if any) that handle installation, upgrade,
etc, etc will lie naked in front of you, helpless to resist
your thrusting intellect.              (note: mine's bigger)