[vox-tech] Debian Unstable - apt strangeness

[David Hummel]

On Fri, Aug 13, 2004 at 03:29:45PM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
>
> dpkg knows nothing about available packages (as indicated in
> /var/lib/apt/lists/*Packages and /var/lib/dpkg/available).  It knows
> only about the contents of /var/lib/dpkg/status -- the "installed
> packages" database.

dpkg must know about available packages since:

$ dpkg -l package-name-pattern

lists available packages (apparently from /var/lib/dpkg/available)
regardless of whether they're installed.

Therefore, it's a bit misleading that dpkg -l with no
package-name-pattern only lists installed packages.

So how is /var/lib/dpkg/available generated if not from apt?

The output of:

$ apt-cache dumpavail

has the same package info as /var/lib/dpkg/available.

I'm sure this can be elucidated by thoroughly reading the documentation
for dpkg and apt, but it's not readily obvious, and the man pages are
not specific enough.

-David