Manual for apt

[Ralf Mardorf]

Since the man page claims "Much like apt itself, its manpage is intended
as an end user interface and as such only mentions the most used
commands and options" and we get"WARNING: apt does not have a stable
CLI interface. Use with caution in scripts." should we assume that
apt is an Easter egg tool that will not be backwards compatible to
itself. IOW could it be that e.g. "apt policy" [1] could be dropped in
the future? Could it happen that "apt list --installed" will output a
different formatted output even within a dot version upgrade? Will
defaults arbitrarily vary from upgrade to upgrade, e.g.

[weremouse at moonstudio ~]$ apt-config dump | grep
Keep-Downloaded-Packages Binary::apt::APT::Keep-Downloaded-Packages "0";

will switch arbitrarily between "0" and "1"?

Regards,
Ralf

[1]
[root at moonstudio weremouse]# apt policy $(apt list --installed | cut -d/ -f1) | grep /ppa -B5 

WARNING: apt does not have a stable CLI interface. Use with caution in scripts.


WARNING: apt does not have a stable CLI interface. Use with caution in scripts.

youtube-dlg:
  Installed: 0.3.8-1~webupd8~xenial3
  Candidate: 0.3.8-1~webupd8~xenial3
  Version table:
 *** 0.3.8-1~webupd8~xenial3 500
        500 http://ppa.launchpad.net/nilarimogard/webupd8/ubuntu xenial/main amd64 Packages
        500 http://ppa.launchpad.net/nilarimogard/webupd8/ubuntu xenial/main i386 Packages
[root at moonstudio weremouse]# man apt | grep policy
[root at moonstudio weremouse]#