Design Documentation for dpkg

[Count of San Francisco]

Hi,

I went to your main webpage (https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg) to try 
to understand the design and architecture of dpkg, itself. I am thinking 
of using this for a personal embedded project and need to try to assess 
its feasibility in my project. However, I cannot find any document on 
the actual design or architecture of dpkg, itself. Do you have any 
documents that describes how the actual design works? Or, do I need to 
read the dpkg code and reverse engineer it? I know how it works from a 
user perspective when installing a package on a Debian system but that 
is not what I am after.


Lastly, I see that perl is used. Is that only used for compilation of 
dpkg or is it needed in the actual execution of dpkg or both?


Thanks,


Scott