available file updating

[Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>]

Can someone tell me why dpkg updates the available file if you
dpkg -i foo.deb (a previosuly unknown package that you manually
downloaded)?

This must be pretty non-useful, since apt's dselect update method
disregards any such changes dpkg makes, and just shoves in its own
available file brute-force (apt-cache dumpavail >
/var/lib/dpkg/available), disregarding the dpkg --update-avail or
--merge-avail that a better citizen would use. And nobody seems to have
complained that this looses data, though it can.

-- 
see shy jo