This is an (incomplete) list of currently provided APIs by dpkg, and their supported status. What: Dpkg (perl modules) Status: testing Description: The API provided by these modules is not yet stable, it's only supposed to be used internally by dpkg for now. What: custom changelog parsers in /usr/lib/dpkg/parsechangelog Status: stable Version: 2.0 Description: Since dpkg 1.14.16, the set of command-line options that custome changelog parsers must support has been expanded (see dpkg-parsechangelog(1)). For compatibility, changelog parsers supporting only the old options are supported in lenny. In lenny+1, that support will be dropped. . For reference, only the -v option was supported in version 1.0 of this API.