This article is about Offline Package Management in Debian. Debian is a pretty well known project. One of the things that makes Debian very popular is APT (a.k.a Advanced Packaging Tool) which allows remote package downloads, upgrades and dependency resolution. Unfortunately it does require a network connection - unless you use apt-offline.
In Debian, when you need to install a package, you usually would fire up the apt-get command and the software would just install without any hand holding.
While APT is really very cool one of the main reasons for its success is the Debian Policy. The Debian Policy is like the brain of the project that controls the entire project ensuring that all the bits and pieces fit well together upto the Debian Standards. APT is just a result of the fantastic Debian Policy work.
In Debian, every package is very well self-contained and is tightly related to each other using APT. APT does a very good job of integrating and resolving dependencies for Package Management and takes off all the Dependency Hell problems from the user.
This is where the problem starts - for a machine which has network access it works very well because APT generates the list of packages and their dependencies and is able to download and install them successfully. More....
