The Debian team has announced the release of apt 3.0.0 (Advanced Package Tool), which incorporates the changes made in the experimental branch 2.9. This new release has been accepted into the DEBIAN UNSTABLE branch and will soon be integrated into the debian testing repository, which is currently working on debian 13. Additionally, the APT 2.9 experimental branch will be added to the Ubuntu package base.
Some of the key changes in this release include a redesigned user interface that provides a more visual display of package dependencies during installation. The names of packages with dependencies are now displayed in separate blocks, with different colors indicating remote packages in red and installed packages in green. The sections “New Packages” and “Additional Packages” have been combined, and duplicate references have been removed. Users can control coloring through various settings and options.
- Automatic division into display pages has been implemented for commands such as “Show”, “Policy”, “List”, “Search”, and “Showsrc”. Users can toggle this feature on using the BINARY setting :: APT :: Pager and set the page separation using the Pager environment variable.
- There have been improvements to the Solver3 dependencies, which can be activated with the “–SOLVER 3.0” option. This includes the implementation of the Search With a Return algorithm.