[BusyBox] what's the necessary infrastructure for dpkg?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  the short question:  is there a list of files/directories that have to 
be in place before one can do the very first dpkg operation on a system?

  the long form: i have a system that was created entirely without the use 
of dpkg, but we want to use dpkg to handle package management from here 
on. 

  as a test, i tried to install my first package, and quickly found out 
that, at a minimum, i needed:

  /var/lib/dpkg/
  /var/lib/dpkg/status
  /var/lib/dpkg/info/

so i just created those objects manually.  once i did that, my first 
package ("tds") installed successfully and i got the info file

  /var/lib/dpkg/info/tds.list

which contained the full list of installed files.  beauty.  so far, so
good.

  but when i tried to remove that package with

  # dpkg -P tds

i got:

  dpkg: Package tds is uninstalled or unknown.

i get the feeling that my problem may be that i still don't have the full,
necessary infrastructure for dpkg and, since this isn't a dpkg-based
system, i have to create all of that manually the first time.  is there a
list somewhere of what has to be in place?  thanks.

rday