thank you for all of the interesting comments. what I am getting at is that there should be a simple way for the user to discover what he or she just installed. "dpkg -L <package name>", which is a good start, gives you information about installed files, but the command itself is not easily discoverable (i didn't know about it, and i've been a Debian user for 1.5 years).
there also isn't an easy way to discover package documentation. yes, you can "$ cat /usr/share/doc/<package name>/README.Debian". again, this is not discoverable, and often there isn't good information there anyway. plus, i'm lazy, and that's a lot of path typing. maybe what is needed is an option something like "$ dpkg -B foo" or "$ dbrief foo", which would produce a brief output something like: foo Debian README: <output of $(cat /usr/share/doc/foo/Debian.README)> foo upstream README: <output of $(zcat /usr/share/doc/foo/README.gz)> foo help: <maybe the output of $(foo --help)> foo binaries: /usr/bin/foo . . . well, again, "$ dpkg -B" and "$ dbrief" aren't exactly discoverable. i don't know if any shell commands are really that discoverable. however, if users were trained (via release documentation) that this is how to discover new packages, i think it would be very useful. the above would be useful in synaptic as well as a compliment to "browse documentation." more thoughts/ideas? mike
