Manual for apt

[Petter Adsen]

On Sat, 3 Sep 2016 10:53:28 +0000
Tony Arnold <tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk> wrote:
> On Sat, 2016-09-03 at 12:35 +0200, Petter Adsen wrote:
> > AIUI, apt is intended as a frontend to the whole dpkg/APT subsystem,
> > as
> > it does not only cover functionality from apt-get, but also things
> > from
> > apt-cache and dpkg.  
> 
> It looks interesting, but I though aptitude did most of this anyway. I
> know aptitude also has a horrible curses interface which I never use!

Tony,

Sure, aptitude is another approach to the same thing - a frontend to
APT/dpkg. I've read on several of the Debian lists that it is no longer
the recommended tool to use, although I can't remember why. And I
agree, the interface is horrid.

> > It is also shorter to type and looks pretty :)  
> 
> Less typing is always welcome. Prettyness I can take or leave, I don't
> care that much!

One of the small things I like about apt is that 'apt update -qq' will
produce no output if there are no updates, otherwise it will print how
many packages have updates. IIRC, apt-get does not do that.

There are a few other nice things, 'apt search' will print package
versions, 'apt-cache search' does not. Colored output is not important
to me.

All in all, I generally use apt now for interactive use, but I wish
somebody would update the man page and --help output. As others have
mentioned, commands and options are missing in the docs, but work - like
'policy'.

Petter

-- 
"Chaos, panic and disorder. My work here is done." --Anne Onymous