deb-override(5)

💅 deb-override — Debian archive override file 💅

okay so this is deb-override(5), a manual page from the dpkg suite, and bestie it's literally about one file named override. let's get into it 🎀

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

override

that's it. that's the whole synopsis. iconic minimalism honestly 👑

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so here's the tea ☕ — most stuff about a package lives right there in its control file, but some info is managed centrally by the distribution czars instead of by the maintainer, all so everything stays globally consistent. that info? it lives in the override file. no cap 🫶

the override file has a simple whitespace-delimited format. comments are allowed, and a comment is denoted with a #.

package priority section [maintainer-info]

okay let's break it down one by one because i love a good breakdown:

• package — this is the name of the package. heads up tho: entries in the override file for packages that are not found in the tree of binary packages are ignored. like, ghosted. 💀
• priority and section — these correspond to the respective control fields available in the .deb. the allowed values are specific to each distribution archive, so don't come at me with a universal list, there isn't one 🦋
• maintainer-info, if present, can be either:
  • the name of a maintainer, for an unconditional override, or
  • old-maintainer => new-maintainer to perform a substitution. literally a whole glow-up for the maintainer field ✨

and one more thing: the override files used to make the official Packages lists may be found in the indices directory on any Debian mirror. go look, i'll wait 🌈

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👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• dpkg-scanpackages(1)
• dpkg-scansources(1)
• apt-ftparchive(1)

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fr fr read those if you wanna know how the override file actually gets consumed — this page just tells you what's in it 💖

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and that's the whole page, bestie! written by the dpkg suite, version 1.23.11-dirty, dated 2026-09-09 — shoutout to the dpkg girlies for keeping this one short and slay 🧚‍♀️💜 bye!! 🦋