Finding documentation for /etc/**/*.dpkg-*
- by intuited
During upgrades, files with these extensions appear in /etc and its subdirectories. I gather that *.dpkg-dist contains the file that was distributed with the currently-installed version of a package, and *.dpkg-new contains the version from the version being installed, however I'd like to see the docs to be sure that I'm getting it right. Also there are occasionally other similarly named files, eg *.dpkg-original, and I'd like to be able to read up on these.
I've checked /usr/share/doc/dpkg for documentation on this, and come up empty; there's no dpkg-doc package; Google doesn't have anything except unanswered questions. Can someone point me to the documentation for this aspect of debian package management?