We upgraded to a new version of Ubuntu and our CI (continuous integration) scripts began to throw errors when uploading packages to out aptly repository:

"Report":{"Warnings":["Unable to read file /srv/aptly/.aptly/upload/mysoft/mysoft-6.15-pk19.deb: unable to find control.tar.gz part in package /srv/aptly/.aptly/upload/mysoft/mysoft-6.15-pk19.deb"],"Added":[],"Removed":[]}}

But if the same command:

dpkg-deb --build $PKGNAME

is executed on our older Ubuntu 16 everyhting is perfect and no error when uploading the package in the repository.

It turns out the new version of dpkg 1.19.0 the dpkg-deb will compress the deb file with XZ by default. Before version 1.19 the default compression is gzip.

You may upgrade your aptly installation to 1.20 and above or just fix your script to use “-Zgzip” with dpkg-deb

dpkg-deb -Zgzip --build $PKGNAME

This command will force the dpkg-deb to use gzip to compress the debian package.

Change the compression of existing deb package

Thanks to the aptly bug report – https://github.com/aptly-dev/aptly/issues/655 (hopes this link stays forever) you may have a workarround to decompress and comrpess an existing package with antoher algorythm

dpkg-deb -R package.deb tmp
rm package.deb
fakeroot dpkg-deb -Zgzip -b tmp package.deb
rm -rf tmp