Bug#113616: apt: inelegant behavior -- broken redundancy with dpkg/dselect

[Peter Jay Salzman <p@dirac.org>]

Package: apt
Version: 0.5.3
Severity: wishlist

i recently found out that apt's knowledge of available packages can be
different from dpkg/dselect.

it's my understanding that "apt-get update" will update apt's knowledge of
available package, but not dpkg/dselect.  it's also my understanding that
"dselect update" will update both apt and dselect/dpkg.

this asymmetric behavior is extremely inelegant, and borders on being an
outright bug.  in the best of all worlds, apt and dselect would be peers --
front ends for dpkg.  or whatever the low-level package manager tool is
(dpkg-deb?).

i asked about this on debian-user, and all the responses were the same.
paraphrased:

   "yeah, i didn't realize that myself for the longest time.  it's very
    inelegant, but that's the way it is"

i think we have a situation where alot of people agree there's a weakness
here.  the debian's package management is so much better than everyone
else's that debian should strive to fix any possible problems or inelegance in
it.

is there a reason for the asymmetric nature of apt and dselect/dpkg that i'm
not privy to?

thanks for listening,
pete

-- System Information
Debian Release: testing/unstable
Kernel Version: Linux satan 2.4.9 #1 SMP Thu Sep 20 08:11:05 PDT 2001 i686 unknown

Versions of the packages apt depends on:
ii  libc6          2.2.4-1        GNU C Library: Shared libraries and Timezone
ii  libstdc++2.10- 2.95.4-0.01090 The GNU stdc++ library