apt and apt-get

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Aug 09, 2019 at 02:28:31PM +0200, Liam Proven wrote:
> APT is the family of tools; historically ``apt-get'' was one of the
> many sub-tools. ``apt'' was another.
> 
> Debian decided this wasn't ideal and put quite a lot of effort into
> ``aptitude'' which is a more powerful replacement and wraps up various
> other tools.

The "apt" program, as opposed to the "apt" package name, only came into
existence in 2013/2014 or so, long after aptitude, so the existence of
both apt-get and apt can't possibly have been part of the motivation for
the creation of aptitude.  (There were always people in Debian working
on both apt and aptitude in different directions; apt supplied a
significant amount of core library code to both frontends.)

I believe that the "apt" frontend program was originally called
"apt-get" mainly because the "apt" name was taken by something else
(IIRC some Java build tool?), now long since obsolete.

> Ubuntu is a descendant of Debian but focusses less on power and more
> on friendliness.
> 
> So it enhanced the ``apt'' tool a bit to make it easier to do common stuff.

While Ubuntu developers have certainly been heavily involved in apt
maintenance and on the "apt" program, for the most part they've been
doing that work in Debian.  It's not in either Debian's or Ubuntu's
interests to have very much divergence in apt code, and for example the
version of apt (1.6.1) that shipped in the original release of Ubuntu
18.04 was a verbatim copy of one that was uploaded to Debian.

Debian experimental has exactly the same version of apt as Ubuntu 19.10
right now.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]