uninstalled packages in 'dpkg -l'

[Maarten Boekhold <boekhold@cindy.et.tudelft.nl>]

Hi,

I always thought that 'dpkg -l' was supposed to show you all *installed*
packages, but, when I do a: dpkg -l 'ncurses*' on my system, I get:

Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge
| Status=Not/Installed/Config-files/Unpacked/Failed-config/Half-installed
|/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=bDesired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge
| Status=Not/Installed/Config-files/Unpacked/Failed-config/Half-installed
|/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=both-problems (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name            Version        Description
+++-===============-==============-============================================
un  ncurses         <unknown>      (no description available)
ii  ncurses-base    1.9.9e-1       Video terminal manipulation: Minimum set of
ii  ncurses-bin     1.9.9e-1       Video terminal manipulation: associated prog
un  ncurses-dev     <unknown>      (no description available)
un  ncurses-develop <unknown>      (no description available)
un  ncurses-pic     <unknown>      (no description available)
un  ncurses-runtime <unknown>      (no description available)
ii  ncurses-term    1.9.9e-1       Video terminal manipulation: additional term
un  ncurses21-dev   <unknown>      (no description available)
ii  ncurses3.0      1.9.9e-1       Video terminal manipulation: shared 

Of these packages, all with a version of <unknown> are not installed, and
I don't want these to show up either. They're confusing me.

What can I do about this?

Maarten

_______________________________________________________________________
| Maarten Boekhold, Faculty of Electrical Engineering TU Delft,   NL  |
|   boekhold@cindy.et.tudelft.nl boekhold@gopher.library.tudelft.nl   |
|                  Take life as a party!                              |
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