What are these directories? official These are official packages that go in the Debian distribution which are made available here by the maintainer. picked-from-woody Packages which have been taken from the woody distribution "as is" because they fixed some bugs in the potato packages. backported-from-woody Packages which have been backported from woody into potato. Care has been taken that the packages will be upgraded without problems to the real woody packages. These packages fix problems in the potato packages. improved These have been improved with some aditional functionality.