dpkg authorship summary the discussion is about the authorship of dpkg dpkg as it stands is a c program with well over contributors the anonymous user at claims that the transition from its perl predecessor to a c program which was done by the subject of this article was merely porting from one language to another analogous to translating a novel i m not aware of any reference having been provided for this view the other view is that the c version was a substantially new program with a much greater feature set this view is supported by dpkg's own authors file which lists the subject of this article as its original author and describes it as based on the perl version not merely translated or ported from it discussion