Been playing around with Apt-Zip (there's a man page online at http://debian.ipv6.fhtw-berlin.de/ger/howto/apt-zip.html) and finding it very useful.
I had to hack the output around so that I caould use FTP in batch mode via windows 2000 but that wasn't too hard (it might be a nice option to put in the apt-zip-list script). And then I neaded to hack the output again to process the .deb files (couldn't get apt-zip-inst to work on my system), but again that was fairly straightforward. I'll do a more detailed write-up if anyone's interested in the details. I must admit that now I've been through the process a couple of times it'd probably be just a quick to drive the whole thing directly from the cmmand line with apt-get and a couple of gawk or perl scripts.
But I have a question for the Debian gurus out there :o)
When I run Synaptic it lists over 80 packages as candidates for upgrade but when I run apt-get in simulate mode to list the package details it only includes 5. It says the others have been 'held back'. Now IIRC this is because upgrading these would involve installing or removing othe packages. Is this correct? If so, is there any way I can override this so the package is included in the list of packages to be upgraded (plus any dependancies). This is so I can use apt-get-zip to download then elsewhere and then do the upgrade offline.