I'm working on a Debian box which "previously" (?) was running Woody (Debian 3.0). I don't know the status of:
- when the last time an "apt-get update" was done (before or after Sarge's release)
- when the last time an "apt-get upgrade" was done (if at all) (again, pre or post Sarge)
- whether or not anyone ever did an "apt-get dist-upgrade" on this system. (post Sarge being released)

but would like to. Are there any Debian utilities that can tell me this stuff?

My /etc/apt/sources.list says "stable" in it.

My /etc/debian_version file has "3.1" in it, but "ls -l" tells me it was last modified July 26, 2004 -- which is before Sarge (3.1) was even released -- which makes *no* sense to me.

This machine is our mail server, and I don't want to botch anything up (it's got some non-Debian qmail pkgs installed on it, which seem to play fairly nicely with other official Debian mail packages/debs), but I may need to update *some* parts and would like to get a handle on which packages are up-to-date and which aren't.

Thanks.

Try with: grep upgrade /var/log/dpkg.log
also check if the log was rotated.

# cd /var/log
# find . -name '*dpkg*'
#

I don't seem to have a dpkg.log file.

Maybe some file in /var/lib/dpkg would reveal something?

I did an "apt-get update", then an "apt-get --dry-run upgrade" and an "apt-get --dry-run dist-upgrade".

Running those commands can give you a rough idea of what you've got.