The Debian Project released APT 3.0 today as the new stable series for Debian’s command-line interface (CLI) for managing packages, a major release that introduces new features and many enhancements.
APT 3.0 package manager gives users a concise and well-laid-out command-line output when updating, installing, or removing packages via the terminal emulator. The new APT 3.0 command-line interface brings a columnar display that will make it easier for users to scan for a package name.
The revamped command-line interface also features support for colors (red for removals and green for other changes), which makes it easier to distinguish commands at a glance, as well as a smoother install progress bar that uses Unicode blocks.
In addition, the new APT 3.0 command-line interface is less verbose and offers more padding to make it easier to separate sections and extract the relevant information for you. You can see a comparison between the new APT 3.0 UI and the current APT UI in the featured screenshot above, thanks to Julian Andres Klode.
APT 3.0 also introduces a new solver (using the --solver option) that allows APT to fallback to non-candidate versions and makes autoremove more aggressive, keeping only the strongest automatically installed packages.
Among other noteworthy changes, APT 3.0 introduces support for --target-release in ‘apt list’, a --comment option to record Comment: in history, support for uncompressed indexes from partial file:/ mirrors, a git-like automatic pager for apt(8), emulating git behavior, and initial pinning information to apt show --full.
It also adds support for debian-ports modernization, introduces the modernize-sources command, support for correctly calculating the kernel size in /boot, support for OpenSSL replacing GnuTLS and gcrypt, transaction support and upgrade count for pkgDepCache, as well as many documentation and translation updates.
9to5linux.com
