Long time Debian user with semi-technical question

[Andrew Weiss <ajwdsp@cloud9.net>]

I have been using Debian since the old A.out days of Debian 1.0, and I was
wondering since I am doing development of our company's own Linux
distribution based on Debian... I have potato as the base and am beginning
to customize and modify it, but haven't really yet... other than Windowmaker
graphics and WDM graphics..

Is it OK to carefully modify /var/lib/dpkg/status?

I need to basically stave off dselect because every time I do an alien
package or just something that isn't in the Packages.gz file.  I haven't
built all binary CD's yet... just the first... though that will change.

It goes in and gives me dependency conflict, then decides it wants to remove
my stuff.  I Give it a big Fat capital R and then Q to force it not to do
that, but I'd like it not to decide these things on its own.  I've had some
luck in the past directly modifying the status file, but sometimes it
doesn't work.  Is there any way to modify deb packages to change their
dependencies since some of the packages are plain stupid... they depend on
perl for instance and I have perl5.005, so I end up doing a dpkg -i
--force-depends... which works, but if you go into dselect afterwards it
wants to remove perl5.005 because it conflicts with the nonexistant package
perl, and decides to remove about half my system (lots of things depend on
perl) which I refuse the changes and force quit the dependency checker back
to the menu.  I'd love to say NO IT DOESN't DEPEND ON THAT PACKAGE YOU
...#@$*^*%! now install and don't talk to me again!  KDE stuff wouldn't go
on because it wanted stdc++2.9, and it was too stupid to realize 2.10 was
newer... I had to force each and every kde package... it worked too, but I
gave up on keeping kde because every time I wanted to add new packages it
wanted to kill kde.  This is my only complaint about Debian, but it needs to
have this feature... a checkbox for are you really sure you want to modify
dependencies... (this may break...blah blah)...disclaimer, but let you do
it.  Those of us customizing Debian to strange hardware need a bit more
freedom with this.

Anyone...?

Andrew