9.1. Unpacking Source Packages

A package's source code distribution usually comes as a .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 file, and you should unpack the file as described in Section 1.18.

Before you unpack, though, verify the contents of the archive with tar tvf, because some packages don't create their own subdirectories in the directory where you extract the archive. Output like the following means that the package is probably okay to unpack: