"I'll start with a brief history lesson. The 'Advanced packaging tool' was introduced in 1998 and first included in a Debian release (2.1 or slink) in 1999. There is no single apt application to speak of, instead it's a series of tools and functions originally designed as a front-end to dpkg--the software at the heart of Debian's package management (it now also support RPM backends). There are several front-ends to apt itself including: Synaptic, aptitude and Adept but I want to look specifically at the base command-line tools--not that there's anything wrong with the front-ends.
"One of the advantages of apt is the repository management. Like most packaging systems, apt uses its repositories to find and retrieve packages..."
