verifying a package

[nijhawank]

Hello everybody:



I have couple of downloaded .deb packages in my
/var/cache/apt/archives. There had been a system crash in the past, how
can I verify that they have not been currupted in the process.



Is there a way I can verify them against their MD5.



I know the repositories contains Packages.gz (or Packages.bz2) which
contains Package description along with their MD5 but it requires some
processing from my side to compare them with this information. Also,
this method fails for some packages when the repository is updated with
newer packages and I have still the old packages lying in my apt cache.



Do I have somewhere in my system locally all the installed packages
MD5.



Does .deb support verification like RPM which can do MD5 or GPG
Authenticity verification. Currently I'm interested in only MD5 as I
downloaded them from supported repositories.



Thanks in advance.

- Kamal N


-- 
nijhawank