“…APT was initially written by Debian developers (Brian White,
Jason Gunthorpe, and contributors), and, therefore, it first only
supported Debian systems and its dpkg package manager. Although it
has been written to be fairly independent of the underlying package
management system, nobody had written a RPM backend for it.
Instead, many independent efforts have created different software
to perform similar tasks in systems that use RPM.”
“…After full integration of the RPM patches into APT, it
will have the potential to become the standard package management
frontend for Linux, shortening the gap between distributions and
reducing incompatibility across distributions for at least one
important system administration tool. Unlike tools from some other
vendors, APT does not have anything tying it to a particular
distribution, not even the word Conectiva in its name, which
hopefully removes some of the common barriers for its wide
acceptance.“
“The temporarily-forked version of APT is already fully
functional and actually works. Conectiva Linux 6.0 — the first
RPM-based distribution to support APT — currently ships with it,
and has some repositories that are available for use with APT.”