Description of the feature request:

Allow the http_archive rule to extract deb archives.

Feature requests: what underlying problem are you trying to solve with this feature?

Debian archives are standard and widely used. There are many scenarios which require the extraction of deb archives during the loading phase. It would be great to have this natively in http_archive.

What operating system are you running Bazel on?

linux/amd64

What's the output of bazel info release?

release 4.0.0

Have you found anything relevant by searching the web?

There isn't a whole lot of great information. I wrote a simple http_deb repository rule which essentially mirrors the behaviour of http_archive but is able to extract deb archives.

ctx.execute(["dpkg-deb", "-x", path, "."])