Ubuntu installers?

[Little Girl]

Hey there,

Colin Watson wrote:
>Little Girl wrote:
>> Liam Proven wrote:
>>>>Owen Thomas wrote:  
>>>>
>>>> I I became jaded and wary of installing software on Ubuntu a
>>>> long time ago because there appeared to be many competing
>>>> "package manager" formats  
>>>
>>>There's APT and there's Snap. That's it.
>> 
>> You might want to add dpkg as a third item on that list.
>
>That's not a different format from apt.  apt calls dpkg.

Your two statements conflict with one another since apt wouldn't need
to call dpkg if they were the same.

Also, we can take a look at the NAME section of the apt and dpkg man
pages to see how they summarize themselves and realize that dpkg is a
package manager, which is what was being listed up there, and apt
isn't, which makes them "different formats" by design:

Here's the NAME section of the apt man page:

	apt - command-line interface

Here's the NAME section of the dpkg man page:

	dpkg - package manager for Debian

We can also take a look at the DESCRIPTION section of the apt and
dpkg man pages to find out how they describe themselves and realize
that apt is a front-end for dpkg, which makes them "different
formats" by design:

Here's the DESCRIPTION section of the apt man page:

	apt provides a high-level commandline interface for the
	package management system. It is intended as an end user
	interface and enables some options better suited for
	interactive usage by default compared to more specialized APT
	tools like apt-get(8) and apt-cache(8).

	Much like apt itself, its manpage is intended as an end user
	interface and as such only mentions the most used commands
	and options partly to not duplicate information in multiple
	places and partly to avoid overwhelming readers with a
	cornucopia of options and details.

Here's the DESCRIPTION section of the dpkg man page:

	dpkg is a medium-level tool to install, build, remove and
	manage Debian packages.  The primary and more user-friendly
	front-end for dpkg as a CLI (command-line interface) is
	apt(8> and as a TUI (terminal user interface) is aptitude(8).
	dpkg itself is controlled entirely via command line
	parameters, which consist of exactly one action and zero or
	more options. The action-parameter tells dpkg what to do and
	options control the behavior of the action in some way.

	dpkg can also be used as a front-end to dpkg-deb(1) and
	dpkg-query(1). The list of supported actions can be found
	later on in the ACTIONS section. If any such action is
	encountered dpkg just runs dpkg-deb or dpkg-query with the
	parameters given to it, but no specific options are currently
	passed to them, to use any such option the back-ends need to
	be called directly.

Also, the OP's point was that there's a bewildering assortment of
package-management tools and instructions for them online. You can
find plenty of instructions for using apt and dpkg to perform various
similar tasks, which contributes to or causes some of the confusion
the OP was referencing.

If I were a brand new user asking for help with [insert task here],
I'd get several different answers using several different tools.
First of all, I'd wonder why there are so many different answers and
then I'd have to figure out how to decide which answer I should
actually follow. That would put me in the difficult, awkward, and
frustrating position of having to get help on the help that was
provided. That's exactly what's happening.

As a result of all of that, dpkg belongs on that list.

[related rant]

To muddy the waters of this discussion on package-management
confusion even more:

* There are command-line commands (like clean and autoclean, for
  example) for the apt front-end that aren't listed in the apt man
  page, but are listed in the apt-get man page.
* There are also a whole bunch of options (like -y or -s, for
  example) for the apt front-end that aren't listed in the apt man
  page, but are listed in the apt-get man page. There are actually no
  options whatsoever listed in the apt man page.

Those of us with experience are aware of those issues and can look
them up in the apt-get man page, but a newcomer may not even know
such a thing. Considering that newcomers are often instructed to "read
the man page" by well-intended helpers, they're likely to become even
more confused when the help they received contains one or more
commands or options not listed in the man page they were told to
reference. That man page really ought to get cleaned up. It's been
like that for years.

[/related rant]

-- 
Little Girl

There is no spoon.