What are these directories? official These are official packages that go in the Debian distribution which are made available here by the maintainer. These might be more recent versions than available on the official Debian mirrors. unofficial These are packages which are not available through the usual Debian chanels. picked-from-sarge Packages which have been taken from the sarge distribution "as is" because they fixed some bugs in the woody packages -or- that they've been removed from woody for obscure or stupid reasons backported-from-sarge Packages which have been picked from sarge and needed to be recompiled to run on woody (because of library dependencies). Care has been taken that the packages will be upgraded without problems to the real sarge packages. improved Contains package which have been improved with extra functionality.