The release of the APT (Advanced Package Tool) 2.2 management tool has been prepared, which incorporates changes accumulated in the experimental branch 2.1. In addition to Debian and its derivatives, APT is also used in some distributions based on the rpm package manager, such as PCLinuxOS and ALT Linux. The new release will soon be integrated into the Debian Unstable branch and into the Ubuntu package repository (the experimental branch 2.1 was used in Ubuntu 20.10).
Notable changes include:
- Support for phased updates has been added, which are already being applied in Ubuntu to limit the spread and manage the deployment of updates. For example, phased updates allow updates for transitioning to a new stable release to be rolled out first to a small percentage of users and, after some time, if no regressions are found, to roll out updates to all other users.
- Additional patterns for selecting packages considering dependencies have been implemented, such as "?depends" and "?conflicts".
- Support for the "Protected" field has been added, which replaces the "Important" field and defines packages that are not allowed to be removed and are necessary for the system to boot correctly.
- An option "--error-on=any" has been added to the "update" command, which, when set, will display an error on any failure.
- The method for applying and extracting rred patches is now available as a separate program for processing pdiff files.
- The code for the handler of old kernel versions removal (autoremoval) has been rewritten from shell to C++ and can now be called during the apt runtime, rather than only when installing kernel packages. This change will ensure the currently used kernel is preserved, rather than the one that was active during the installation of a new kernel package. To avoid overflowing the /boot partition, three kernels will be preserved instead of four.
- The XXH3 hashing algorithm has been employed for caching element indexing instead of Adler32 or RC32c. The size of the hash table has been increased.
- The apt-key utility is scheduled for removal in the second quarter of 2022.
Source: opennet.ru
