Dpkg is the Ubuntu package manager dpkg is a medium-level tool to install, build, remove and manage Ubuntu packages. The primary and more user-friendly front-end for dpkg is dselect.dpkg itself is controlled entirely via command line parameters,which consist of exactly one action and zero or more options.

dpkg is pretty slow in Debian-based systems, usually because of the many files which are stored in the /var/lib/dpkg/info folder. To speed up things, Luca Bruno created a project called tdpkg which uses an sqlite3 or tokyocabinet database for loading the dpkg .list files in the /var/lib/dpkg/info folder which makes dpkg a lot faster.

n Debian GNU/Linux and its derivatives such as Ubuntu the software packages are bundled in a special format. We generally call them deb packages. A .deb package is basically an archive of files that you want to install to your computer, plus some header and control information that identifies the software. The deb files can be manipulated with dpkg command.

In the last years, I have seen many people try to use dpkg –build to create Debian packages. Indeed, if you look up dpkg’s and dpkg-deb‘s manual pages, this option seems to be what you have to use:

-b, –build directory [archive|directory

The versions 1.15.6 and 1.15.7 of dpkg introduced several important changes. Let's skim over them:

The source package format 3.0 (quilt) has a neat feature for this. Instead of unconditionally using debian/patches/series to look up patches, dpkg-source first tries to use debian/patches/vendor.series (where vendor is ubuntu, debian, etc.). Note that dpkg-source does not stack patches from multiple series file, it uses a single series file, the first that exists.

If you have an ubuntu/debian system , you can rebuild the deb file of any installed package. For this install the dpkg-repack package.

Five of the top 10 most downloaded distributions on Distrowatch use the Debian package system. It has developed a rich infrastructure of utilities -- not just the core commands apt-get and dpkg, but also such less well-known commands as apt-cache, apt-spy, and apt-listbugs.

Fedora's Pirut is a useful tool for basic software installation and package searches. However, if you really want to take control of package management, you need to get back to basics with yum. Just as, on Debian systems, dpkg is the back end underlying apt-get and graphical tools such as Synaptic, so on RPM systems, yum is the hidden power behind Pirut and the Pup updater.