Ian, We can make your proposal simpler by using virtual package names to find the libraries.
Each package that provides a shared library should, for each shared
library that it provides, automaticaly add something like
"Provides: libX11.so.6" to the control file. Each package that depends
on a library should automaticaly add "Depends: libX11.so.6" to the
control file.
If you want to know about the executable format, you could prepend
"elf-i386-" to the library name.
Thanks
Bruce
