Sort of makes sense if you consider the history behind it: dpkg installs software, not apt-get. apt-get, aptitude, etc. are higher-level dependency resolution tools that simply loop in dpkg to actually install packages. dselect is an older tool that did dependencies before apt-get came around.
RPM distros are similar, as they use higher-level tools to do dependencies (yum, zypper, etc.; there was even apt for RPM) and then RPM to actually install the packages and track them.
Admittedly though Debian's command line tools are stuck in the past in this regard, as the user shouldn't need to care about all this. Arch gets this right by putting it all into pacman.
Debian (and Ubuntu etc.) has a tool available that unifies all the many different commands required for administrating and querying the package system. It's called "wajig". I don't believe it's installed by default, though. I rarely see it suggested, probably because whenever people complain about the complexity of the command-line tools, the answer they get is "use the GUI tools".
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Sort of makes sense if you consider the history behind it: dpkg installs software, not apt-get. apt-get, aptitude, etc. are higher-level dependency resolution tools that simply loop in dpkg to actually install packages. dselect is an older tool that did dependencies before apt-get came around.
RPM distros are similar, as they use higher-level tools to do dependencies (yum, zypper, etc.; there was even apt for RPM) and then RPM to actually install the packages and track them.
Admittedly though Debian's command line tools are stuck in the past in this regard, as the user shouldn't need to care about all this. Arch gets this right by putting it all into pacman.
Debian (and Ubuntu etc.) has a tool available that unifies all the many different commands required for administrating and querying the package system. It's called "wajig". I don't believe it's installed by default, though. I rarely see it suggested, probably because whenever people complain about the complexity of the command-line tools, the answer they get is "use the GUI tools".