man page for dpkg

["Susan G. Kleinmann" <sgk@sgk.tiac.net>]

For some time now, I have wished for a 'man' page for dpkg.  Lacking one,
I have, over time, horded various email messages which contain little tidbits
of information, and made reverse-engineering notes on my own.  This 
collection of emails and notes has by now become sufficiently large and 
chaotic that it seemed the lesser of several evils to try to forge a man 
page out of the contents of the emails, so I did.  This man page is full of 
TBD's and probably mistakes as well.  For that reason, I hesitate to send 
the draft to the whole group, since it might spread more mis-information than 
information in its present state.  Nonetheless, I have actually done quite a 
bit of work on it, since the simple act of collecting all of the various 
flags for dpkg and dpkg-deb and formatting them into a man page (actually, 
it is already 5 man-pages) causes both boredom and finger-bruising.

If there is anyone out there who would like to help me fill in the blanks,
the result might be a short document helpful to the entire group (and not
simply a mechanism for cleaning up my email archives).

Susan Kleinmann
sgk@sgk.tiac.net