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What is the role of the /var/lib/dpkg/available file in Ubuntu and Debian machines?

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    This question is not a duplicate of "How to recreate /var/lib/dpkg/status". status and available are different files with (presumably) different purposes. status tracks the status of installed (or partially installed, or to-be-installed) packages. However, all man dpkg says about available is the following: "dpkg keeps its record of available packages in /var/lib/dpkg/available." However, the man page never explains what it meas for a package to be "available". So the question is very much unanswered, imo. Commented Apr 1, 2018 at 3:26

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Beyond the obvious (a list of currently-available package versions, used by the Debian installers such as dselect, dpkg and apt), not much. It's a flat-file database (or cache of one).

Further reading:

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  • apt doesn't use /var/lib/dpkg/available, it uses its own caches. Commented Jun 2, 2016 at 9:40
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/var/lib/dpkg/available is the list of available packages in dpkg-based systems (such as Debian and Ubuntu).

For more info:

man dpkg
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