Just a thought, but I was wondering if perhaps the dselect program could be modified to allow for it to not allow you to be able to select .deb archives that are non-existent? I've noticed that for the .deb archives that I haven't downloaded, the only way I know that they're not there, is that their names don't show up during execution of the installation script.
Perhaps you could have a warning in the dselect windowed interface that gives you an error if you try to install a non-existent package? Also, in the matter of gs(?), the dselect program does not state that X11-R6 is required to be installed; it states that svgalib can also be used. However, in the list of dependencies (brought up by the 'i'nfo command, it states that X11-R6 _IS_ required.) When installing it, it fails, giving the reason that the Xlib library is not installed. So, can you use it without Xlib, and instead use svgalib? i.e. Do I need to do a dpkg-deb, and force it to install, ignoring dependencies? Thanks in advance.