Packages
Introductory notes
All packages that are included in the official Debian distribution are free according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. This assures free use and redistribution of the packages and their complete source code. The official Debian distribution is what is contained in the main section of the Debian archive.
As a service to our users, we also provide packages in separate sections that cannot be included in the main distribution due to either a restrictive license or legal issues. They include:
- Contrib
- Packages in this area are freely licensed by the copyright holder but depend on other software that is not free.
- Non-Free
- Packages in this area have some onerous license condition restricting use or redistribution of the software.
- Non-Free-Firmware
- This section is restricted to device firmware. While packages in this area basically have the same underlying license restrictions as those in non-free, a special exception has been made for them: even if not being DFSG-free, packages from non-free-firmware are allowed to be included in the official installation images.
Note that same packages might appear in several distributions, but with different version numbers.
View package lists
- View the packages in the stable distribution
-
This is the latest official release of the Debian distribution. This is stable and well tested software, which changes only if major security or usability fixes are incorporated.
See the stable release pages for more information.
- View the packages in the testing distribution
-
This area contains packages that are intended to become part of the next stable distribution. There are strict criteria a package in unstable (see below) must obey before it can be added to testing. Note that
testing
does not get the timely security updates from the security team.See the testing distribution pages for more information.
- View the packages in the unstable distribution
-
This area contains the most recent packages in Debian. Once a package has met our criterion for stability and quality of packaging, it will be included in testing.
unstable
is also not supported by the security team.Packages in unstable are the least tested and may contain problems severe enough to affect the stability of your system. Only experienced users should consider using this distribution.
See the unstable distribution pages for more information.
Search package directories
There are shortcuts for some searches available:
https://packages.debian.org/name
for the search on package names.https://packages.debian.org/src:name
for the search on source package names.
Search the contents of packages
This search engine allows you to search the contents of Debian distributions for any files (or just parts of file names) that are part of packages. You can also get a full list of files in a given package.
There is also a shortcut available:
https://packages.debian.org/file:path
for the search for paths ending in the keyword.