14 DAY TRIAL // The APT (Advanced Package Tool) is getting ready to receive some pretty important new features and developers are saying that this is probably the best version to be released. It's still under production, but we can only hope that it will arrive much faster than the previous 1.0 branch.
It took the APT devs almost 16 years to reach 1.0, but the version was stable long before that. When the makers of APT finally decided to move to 1.0, they also implemented some cool features. It seems that the 1.1 release is going to be even bigger than that and it will be here much sooner. The problem is that distros besides Debian still need to adopt it and make it default.
APT is an incredibly useful application on Linux distros and it can be used to download, install, and perform all kind of maintenance functions. It's easy to see why this is a very important application and why anything that has to do with it must be quite sensitive. In fact, even if you're not using APT in a terminal, you're still taking advantage of it when you open your dedicated GUI tool.
APT (Advanced Package Tool) 1.1 is making serious promises
"Today, in celebration of DebConf 15 and David's talk 'This APT has Supercow Powers' we uploaded a new pre-release of APT to experimental. Special thanks to paultag for ACCEPTing the upload today. There's also a matching python-apt upload, and a new aptitude should come soon as well. It is the best pre-release ever. Since the previous 1.1 pre-releases in experimental, and even much more since the 1.0 series in unstable, APT has seen a huge amount of changes, and we would love to get feedback from you on those!" wrote Julian Andres Klode on the official mailing list.
Developers have also said that APT installation now works as it should and resolved dependencies autoremove and autoclean can now be written as "auto-remove" and "auto-clean." Moreover, lots of other smaller changes have been made.
Advanced Package Tool was launched back in 1998 and version 1.0 was reached 16 years later, although it had been a stable package for years. The developers took advantage of the big version change and made a few modifications, like the change of syntax and the introduction of progress indicators.
For now, this particular new version is not ready for download, but it should land pretty soon.