The documentation for Debian and the dpkg package managment system explains the debian/control files are meta data for packages, e.g. these docs explain:
The control file contains the information that the package manager (such as apt-get, synaptic, and adept) uses, build-time dependencies, maintainer information, and much more.
On ubuntu the file /var/lib/dpkg/status contains the contents of installed packages control files, but when ever I have extracted packages I have never seen a control file in the package itself.
My understanding the APT/DPKG system that ubuntu and debian uses is that the apt-get update command will connect to all defined repositories and pull down a package.gz file for each repo.
In that case does the data defined in each packages control file get stored in the package.gz so that it is available to the apt-cache system - rather than directly to dpkg.
This makes sense to me because that would supply the meta data for a package to the apt-cache showpkg command without having to install the package.
If this is not the case then where are the debian control files stored?
data.tar.gz(actual package contents) andcontrol.tar.gz, which contains filecontrolwith information you mentioned. It also contains filedebian-binary, it's probably a version number of .deb file format. I don't know which tool you've used to unpack .deb files, but I recomment you to start withar, because each .deb is a simple ar archive.ar t libc6_2.19-18+deb8u2_i386.debwhich displays:debian-binary control.tar.gz data.tar.gzdpkg -x <package>to extract - and for some reason it was stripping all the important files out during the extraction -arshows the true state of affairs !