Upgrading to Ubuntu 20, *how* to back up?

[Colin Watson]

A few historical corrections:

On Tue, Apr 28, 2020 at 04:57:57PM +0200, Liam Proven wrote:
> Apt used to have several sub-commands:
>  • apt-get
>  • apt-search
>  • apt-cache
> ... as well as the bare `apt` command. It was quite confusing.

Until 2013 there was no bare "apt" command; if memory serves this is
because that command name was at one point taken by some (now
long-obsolete) Java tool or other.

As far as I know "apt-search" has never existed (at least not as part of
apt itself), only "apt-cache search".

> Ubuntu did not adopt aptitude.

At one point we did use it as an optional part of the installer in the
case where you wanted to do manual package selection there.  It was
never a high-profile thing, and I think it's true that we never
advertised it as the primary frontend in the way that Debian at one
point did, but there was a point where we wanted an ncurses-style
frontend and aptitude was the main game in town.

> Instead, Ubuntu improved the `apt` command, and made just `apt` do
> what was previously done by apt, apt-get, apt-cache and others. So,
> for instance:

In fairness I must say that this gives credit to Ubuntu where it's not
clear that it's deserved.  The work was done upstream in Debian, albeit
by people who are also Ubuntu developers; it had the core functionality
of apt-get and apt-cache from the beginning, although it was refined
over time.  (The main author of the changes in question is a Canonical
employee, but there was a period when they went off to do other things
before coming back to us, and as far as I can tell the main part of this
work was done during that period.)

The first release of the standalone apt binary was in apt 0.9.11,
uploaded to Debian unstable on 2013-08-21.  These changes were first
merged into Ubuntu in apt 0.9.13~exp1ubuntu1, uploaded to Ubuntu trusty
on 2013-11-23.

It's generally hard to track this sort of thing if you aren't paying a
lot of detailed attention, because Ubuntu has a long history of having
several key apt developers involved in it.  And in some respects it
doesn't matter too much because most of this work has been done in
common between the two distributions by many of the same people, but I
wanted to make sure credit goes where it's due. :-)

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]