Beyond Synaptic–Using apt for Better Package Management

“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…”

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