There are tons of information categories in the apt Packages file. But one they forgot when making the spec was some kind of date information. For unless a maintainer somehow smuggles it in, say in the version number, $ apt-cache policy icom Installed: 19990819-3 Candidate: 20020923-2 otherwise we offline users have no idea if were looking at something that hasn't changed since the 90's, or was just updated last week, without having to connect our modems to find out.
Sure, "you don't need to know the date, as you are using sid and did apt-get update, you are assured it's the latest version". Well, one doesn't need the maintainer field either etc.
