I updated this patch for dpkg_1.14.29.tar.gz, attached here. Avoiding fakeroot is important in our case, for building .deb packages on various Linux build hosts with the same statically linked dpkg-deb binary. Since RedHat doesn't tend to have fakeroot, it seems rather problematic to deploy that, especially given possible mixtures of 32-bit and 64-bit tar, etc. Unfortunately when fakeroot fails it results in results in the wrong file permissions in the .deb, but in a production environment it is a matter of tracking down which build host the broken build came from.
I'd recommend reconsidering this for dpkg-deb mainline, if only because we don't want to maintain a fork of dpkg-deb. Regards, Nigel Stewart
dpkg-deb-root.diff
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