[Slackbuilds-users] deb2tgz deletes user's files!

[B. Watson]

On Tue, 7 Jan 2025, dchmelik at gmail.com wrote:

> http://download.gigabyte.com/FileList/Utility/AI_TOP_Utility_ver_2_0_1_release.zip?v=3dcfb2d63a787c71cc8e34dea4db58c0

The .deb package inside the .zip file looks fine, when I pick it apart
manually with ar and tar:

# ar t AI_TOP_Utility_ver_2_0_1/gigabyte-ai-top-utility-2.0.1.deb
debian-binary
control.tar.gz
data.tar.xz
# ar x AI_TOP_Utility_ver_2_0_1/gigabyte-ai-top-utility-2.0.1.deb data.tar.xz
# tar tvf data.tar.xz |head -5
drwxr-xr-x 0/0               0 2024-12-28 11:04 ./
drwxr-xr-x 0/0               0 2024-12-28 11:04 ./usr/
drwxr-xr-x 0/0               0 2024-12-28 11:04 ./usr/share/
drwxr-xr-x 0/0               0 2024-12-28 11:04 ./usr/share/icons/
drwxr-xr-x 0/0               0 2024-12-28 11:04 ./usr/share/icons/hicolor/

...I tried running deb2tgz on it the same way you did, but got different
results (also failure):

# deb2tgz AI_TOP_Utility_ver_2_0_1/gigabyte-ai-top-utility-2.0.1.deb 
ERROR:  ar failed. (maybe AI_TOP_Utility_ver_2_0_1/gigabyte-ai-top-utility-2.0.1.deb is not an DEB?)

However, if you cd into the directory and run it with just the filename:

# cd AI_TOP_Utility_ver_2_0_1
# deb2tgz gigabyte-ai-top-utility-2.0.1.deb
# ls -l *.t?z
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 275757980 Jan  8 03:53 gigabyte-ai-top-utility-2.0.1.txz

So it worked. It seems to hate having a relative path to the .deb
file. I don't know why. In any case, I didn't get results like you
got.

Your output included "Making symbolic link creation script". That's
normally printed by makepkg. *Nothing* in /usr/bin/deb2tgz has that
text or calls makepkg. All it does it deduce the compression type
(from looking at the output of 'ar'), extract the data.tar.*, and
rename it to match the original .deb filename.

Are you sure your deb2tgz command is actually the /usr/bin/deb2tgz one
from SBo?

# which deb2tgz
/usr/bin/deb2tgz

When I run it with no arguments, I get:

# deb2tgz 
/usr/bin/deb2tgz:  Converts DEB format to standard GNU tar + (GZ/XZ/LZ/BZ) format.
     (view converted packages with "less", install and remove
     with "installpkg", "removepkg", "pkgtool", or manually
     with "tar")

Usage:    /usr/bin/deb2tgz <file.deb>
     (Outputs "file.t*z")

What output do you get from the above two commands? If it's the same
as mine, your original email is missing whatever 'makepkg' command you
ran, to produce the "Making symbolic link creation script". We can't
try to diagnose the problem if we can't see it.