Hi, Justin B Rye wrote: > David Kalnischkies wrote:
>> The package apt provides more than just apt-get and apt-cache - >> even through these are arguable the most prominent. Makes sense. Quick reactions: > We don't have to > state that APT officially stands for Advanced Package Tool, but > "Debian's advanced package tool" makes a perfectly fine package > synopsis regardless (hence my comment about deniability, though I > don't see why it's so crucial to be able to pretend that it's > user-hostile gibberish). The problem with "advanced" is that at first glance APT is only fancy relative to dpkg. I suppose that sets up a good angle for the long description --- convince the reader that this can compete with the likes of yum! (I'm kidding; please don't hurt me.) >> This package provides the common ground for searching and >> managing packages as well as information about packages >> other package managers can be depend upon. > > I agree with the idea of introducing the APT infrastructure as a whole > first, but I'd rephrase it to be clearer about the layers (and leave > the features it provides for the next paragraph). Maybe: > > APT provides mechanisms for package management tasks, relying on dpkg as > a back-end and providing an infrastructure that other tools can build on. Seems a bit vague. What is APT, anyway --- is it a library? http://wiki.debian.org/Apt says: Apt (for Advanced Package Tool) is a set of core tools inside Debian. Apt makes it possible to: * Install applications * Remove applications * Keep your applications up to date * And much more... Apt, which basically resolves problems of dependencies and retrieves the requested packages, works with dpkg, another tool, which handles the actual installation and removal of packages (applications). Apt is very powerful, and is primarily used on the command line (console/terminal). There are, however, many GUI/Graphical tools to let you use Apt without having to touch the command line. At the present time, aptitude is the recommended tool for interaction with the APT suite. APT tools should be used for specific management actions that may not be covered by aptitude, or where the latter behaves more aggressively with dependencies. Wikipedia has something nice to say: APT was originally designed as a front-end for dpkg to work with Debian's .deb packages, but it has since been modified to also work with the RPM Package Manager system via apt-rpm. Cupt does not declare a dependency on APT. Today if I read the code correctly it relies on /var/lib/apt existing but I suspect that's just a small oversight. I suppose if I ran the world, the package description would start with something to the effect that APT was originally designed as a powerful front-end for dpkg; nowadays a variant named apt-rpm is also available for use on non-Debian systems that use the RPM Package Manager. Please don't take my wording too seriously (unless you are fixing it, in which case please take it very seriously). This is a sketch. >> This package provides the common ground for searching and >> managing packages as well as information about packages >> other package managers can be depend upon. APT can be used to install or remove packages by name and is responsible for resolving dependencies and retrieving the appropriate version of the requested packages. Unless configured otherwise, it will authenticate the sources of the packages it uses and always validates the retrieved data. To support this work it maintains information about packages in a format optimized for fast information retrieval. Even people who don't use APT's package management features day-to-day (maybe they use dselect?) would find its searchable package cache very useful. [...] > Now that you mention it, yes, it definitely deserves a bulletpoint for > the authentication part... but could we add a reference to "knowing > which version you need, and where to get it"? > > It supports: > * searching for package information; > * resolving package install requests, finding the appropriate version > in the archives; > * fetching packages along with all their required dependencies; > * authenticating the sources and validating the retrieved data; > * installing and removing packages on a working system. This wording is much better than what I wrote above. The bulleted-list form makes it hard to read straight through, though. Maybe: This package contains several command-line tools, of which the most prominent are apt-get, which installs and removes packages by name (transparently resolving package dependencies and conflicts, finding the appropriate versions of packages in the archives or on CD, and downloading and authenticating them) and apt-cache, which can be used to search for package information. It also provides a libapt_pkg library exposing this functionality for use by higher-level interfaces like aptitude, synaptic, wajig, and upgrade-system. By the way, why isn't libapt-pkg in a separate (versioned) package? It would make transitions a little easier. [...] >> - apt-config as an interface to the configuration settings I guess it might be worth sneaking it somewhere that APT is highly configurable, that APT can be used as a dselect backend, that APT can easily be extended to learn additional protocols, and that to install a package from a .deb, the user might want gdebi instead (by the way, why doesn't apt do that?). Thanks and hope that helps. Regards, Jonathan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
