Lenny backport of APT to get round "too many packages" problem ?

[Nick Leverton <nick@leverton.org>]

For my systems which are still running Lenny, it's becoming quite a
problem that apt 0.7 only handles 16-bit count of package versions.  For
instance with Lenny, lenny-volatile, lenny-backports, debian-multimedia
and my private repo, APT now barfs as soon as I add in the main squeeze
and squeeze-updates repositories (I want them so as to have squeeze
packages available and reduce the number of backported dependencies).

I'm not sure what the minimum set of backports would be to increase the
package count within apt and other package managers, but would there
be any possibility of backporting APT 0.8 to Lenny or some other way of
getting around this, please ?

Thankyou,

Nick Leverton