Keeping apt-get, dpkg & dselect in sync

[Brian Greenfield <bri@zombie.org.uk>]

I use apt-get to keep this potato box up to date. However, I
often use dpkg -l to search for packages whose name I'm not
quite sure of. It was during one of these searches ('dpkg -l
syslog\*') that I noticed that the packages available
according to dpkg is different to that of dselect and
apt-get.

dselect also 'knows' that syslogd isn't an available
package. How can this be? I understood that dselect and dpkg
used the same files (those in /var/lib/dpkg/).

How can I get dpkg, dselect and apt all in sync? Should I do
an update using the apt method of dselect. How else could I
update dpkg without involving dselect.

The details follow:

|zippy:~$ su -c 'apt-get install -s syslogd'
|Password:
|Reading Package Lists... Done
|Building Dependency Tree... Done
|Note, selecting sysklogd instead of syslogd
|Sorry, sysklogd is already the newest version
|0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
|zippy:~$
|zippy:~$ dpkg -l syslog\*
|Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
|| 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
|+++-===============-=============-=============================================
|pn  syslog-summary  <none>        (no description available)
|un  syslogd         <none>        (no description available)

Thanks for reading.