How to check what version of a package is available in the current ubuntu?

[Peng Yu]

On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 11:30 AM, Oliver Grawert <ogra at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> hi,
> Am Freitag, den 12.02.2010, 10:52 -0600 schrieb Peng Yu:
>> My bash is of the following version. I'm wondering if I want to update
>> bash what version I will get.
>>
>> $ bash --version
>> GNU bash, version 3.2.39(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
>> Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
>>
>> I searched on the ubuntu website. There are too many related packages.
>> Could somebody let me know which one will be used when bash is
>> updated?
>>
>> http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=bash&searchon=names&suite=karmic&section=all
>>
> you seem to have installed jaunty (9.04) on your machine (you can check
> that with the lsb_release -a command).
>
> note that packages.ubuntu.com always defaults to the latest release of
> ubuntu which would be karmic (9.10) to search for a package in jaunty
> you need to explicitly select jaunty on the search form.
>
> as you can see on https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/bash version 3.2
> is in jaunty while 4.0 is in karmic ...

I have the following output.

$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID:	Ubuntu
Description:	Ubuntu 8.04.3 LTS
Release:	8.04
Codename:	hardy

If my machine is jaunty, there is no way to update bash to the latest
version by apt-get?