[Christopher Crammond] > Suppose you have a repository stuffed full of binary packages, in > this case Debian Packages. If you were unlucky enough to have them > in a rather un-organized fashion, I was just wondering if the package > file itself would provide said information to allow me to write a > program to sort them out. The tool you have is the Depends line in each package. You can retrieve this information using 'dpkg --info'. Specifically, over half of Debian packages declare a dependency on 'libc6', usually greater than or equal to a particular version. The required libc6 version corresponds to distributions like so: libc6 (>= 2.1.something) Debian 2.2 (potato) libc6 (>= 2.2.5-something) Debian 3.0 (woody) libc6 (>= 2.3.2.ds1-something) Debian 3.1 (sarge) libc6 (>= 2.3.5-something) Debian etch or sid Packages that don't depend on libc6 often depend on something else that will give away the game, like perl. Potato shipped with perl 5.005 or so, woody with perl 5.6.1, sarge with perl 5.8.4, and etch currently has perl 5.8.7. So some perl packages will include versioned dependencies that provide a clue. If a package contains no dependencies that tell you what version of Debian they're intended for, then more than likely it does not matter. Note also that the way these dependencies are declared, usually a lower version limit is provided but no upper limit, which means exactly what you think it means: many if not most woody packages will install and run correctly on sarge, and so forth.
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