Updating /var/lib/dpkg/available

[Andrew Beverley <andy@andybev.com>]

Continuing my package building attempts, I've just found that
my /var/lib/dpkg/available file was out of date (despite the system
being a completely fresh install on my VPS). As a result, my package
dependencies were being calculated incorrectly.

My questions:

1. Is there any way to detect this situation, that we could add to
dh-make-perl?

2. What is the correct way to update it? I found that neither "apt-get
update" nor "aptitude update" rebuilt it, which surprised me. I had to
install dselect and run "dselect update" in order to refresh it.

Thanks,

Andy