APT (Advanced Package Tool) New Release Is Out

APT (Advanced Package Tool) New Release Is Out


 
Advanced Package Tool has received quite a substantial update when the application moved to the 1.x branch, and since then the devs have made quite a few changes and improvements. It’s still in the works and each new release is impressive.

It’s strange to see that this tool hasn’t been widely adopted by other distros by default and most of the devs still prefer to use the old version, which is considered to be much more stable. The APT tool is used in Debian and other distros based on this operating system, like Ubuntu for example, but these distros are using older versions (which are still used as apt-get).

The developers have explained that “APT (Advanced Package Tool) Apt, which basically resolves dependency problems and retrieves the requested packages, works with dpkg, another tool, which handles the actual installation and removal of packages (applications). Apt is very powerful, and is primarily used on the command line (console/terminal).”

According to the changelog, yielding blank lines with APT::Cmd::use-format=true has been avoided, Proxy-Auto-Detect check is now used for each host, a testcase for apt list –all-versions has been added, the string matching for dpkg I/O errors has been updated, the dpkg status line is now properly parsed, the incorrect upgradable listing in the “apt list” has been fixed, the Debug::Acquire::http debug output has been improved, regular expressions in “apt search” are now supported, –full has been added in “apt search,” and the progress report for upgrade and reinstall has been fixed.

It was launched back in 1998 and version 1.0 was reached 16 years later, although it had been a stable package for years. The developers took advantage of the big version change and made a few modifications, like the change of syntax and the introduction of progress indicators.

A complete list of modifications and updates can be found in the official changelog. You can download APT (Advanced Package Tool) 1.0.8 right now from Softpedia, but if you get the source package you won’t be able to do much with it.

It’s possible to install the new APT tool in parallel with the one you are using now. You will only make it work with the new syntax. For example, to update the repos you will have to run with this command:

sudo apt update

and not

sudo apt-get update.