Sheldon E. Newhouse writes ("dpkg build problem"):
> I have been using slackware 2.3 and wanted to try out a few debian
> packages to see if I would want to change.
>
> I downloaded dpkg-1.0.5, but have been unable to compile it.
Your ncurses is horribly out of date and broken.
Upgrade to Debian :-).
Ian.