What does this mean?

["Michael S. Peek" <peek@tiem.utk.edu>]

Hello all,

I'm struggling to wrap my feeble intelect around the debian installation
scripts, so I thought I would take a gander at the scripts in
/var/lib/dpkg/info/ and see how other people handle things.  I've come accross
several statements that I don't understand, and that aren't documented
anywhere that I can find.

dpkg --assert-support-predepends
dpkg --assert-working-epoch

The only thing I can find about these options are from dpkg --help:

For internal use: dpkg --assert-support-predepends | --predep-package |
  --assert-working-epoch | --assert-long-filenames | --assert-multi-conrep

What do these mean?

Thanks for your help,

Michael Peek