Interfaces for dpkg/deb packages

[Christopher Crammond <ccrammond@opencountry.com>]

Greetings All:

First-time poster, please be gentle.  :)

I was curious as to where I might be able to find out what
non-command-line interfaces into .deb packages are available.  For
instance, is there a C interface that could pull out information such as
Name, Version, Release, etc... ?

I posted the above question on the debian-policy mailing list, and I got
back that .deb is simply an AR file & that writing my own routines
shouldn't be too hard.  While I agree, I figure this is probably already
done/documented somewhere else (say the dpkg project).  Where is the
right place to start asking questions?

For instance, the parse.c file in dpkg-1.10.28/lib looks promising, but
where can I get more information about this?

Thanks,
-- christopher

-- 
Christopher Crammond, Software Engineer
Open Country, Inc.
ccrammond@opencountry.com
650.591.8080 ext 246