question about dpkg's conflict resolution

[Hermano Cabral <orion@massey.ee.nd.edu>]

Hi,

I'm confused about dpkg's package conflict resolution.  Right now I have
perl-base installed in my machine running potato,

$ dpkg -l perl-base
[some information cut for brevity]
ii  perl-base                  5.004.05-1.1 

I then tried to (re)install perl-5.005-base,

$ dpkg --no-act -i perl-5.005-base_5.005.03-7.1.deb
(Reading database ... 53315 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace perl-5.005-base 5.005.03-7.1 (using perl-5.005-base_5.005.03-7.1.deb) ...

which dpkg does without complaining.  But this package should conflict
with perl-base, as can be seen below,

$ dpkg-deb -I perl-5.005-base_5.005.03-7.1.deb
[some information cut for brevity]
 Package: perl-5.005-base
 Version: 5.005.03-7.1
 Architecture: sparc
 Pre-Depends: libc6 (>= 2.1.2), libdb2 (>= 1:2.4.14-7), libgdbmg1
 Suggests: perl-5.005
 Conflicts: perl-base (<<5.004.05), perl
 Replaces: perl-base, perl-5.005
 Provides: perl5-base
 Installed-Size: 1496
 Maintainer: Darren Stalder <torin@daft.com>

dpkg version is

$ dpkg --version
Debian GNU/Linux `dpkg' package management program version 1.6.14 (sparc).

Why doesn't dpkg complains, then?  Am I missing something?  I noticed
this ``problem'' when I tried to install perl-5.005-base (it wasn't
installed before, as was the case for the machine above) with perl-base
already installed, and dselect complained (in the machine above dselect
also doesn't give a hiccup if I uninstall and reinstall
perl-5.005-base).  Thanks in advance for any help,

-- 
Hermano Cabral