(29-07-2017, 09:49 AM)pizzaroll1 Wrote: Well, I don't know how it works for some Linux distros. But for {Free,Open,Net}BSD, Gentoo, the port/ebuild itself ends up in a version-controlled tree with the rest of the ports so there's no point keeping our tree around after it's added.

Debian is a bit weirder, I think, since there's supposed to be a "debian" directory in the source tarball or something? I don't know, really.

.deb packages are cpio archives containing a tarball of the sources, and a bunch of metadata files (or something close to that). RPMs are somewhat similar.