The release of the APT 2.9.15 package management tool (Advanced Package Tool) has been published. The 2.9.x branch is experimental and is used to develop the functionality of the future stable version APT 3.0, which will be integrated into Debian Testing after stabilization and will be included in the next major release of Debian, as well as added to the Ubuntu package repository.
The key change in the new version is the final discontinuation of the apt-key utility for managing keys used to verify digital signatures of packages. The apt-key utility was deprecated several years ago due to the shift away from the old model of package integrity verification, which used a shared keyring (/etc/apt/trusted.gpg) and lacked repository-specific key bindings. This meant that a key added for a third-party repository would work for verifying packages in all repositories. The new method of managing keys replaces apt-key and requires separate key storage for each repository (/etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/ or /etc/apt/keyrings/).
Other changes:
- A path to call gpg has been added for the Rust-written utility gpg-sq, which takes the same arguments as the gpg utility but simulates its operation through Sequoia, an OpenPGP implementation in Rust. The invocation of gpg-sq takes priority over gpg, so to use gpg-sq instead of gpg, simply install the corresponding package.
- Key types are now bound to file extensions: the ‘.asc’ extension is associated with ascii-armored keys, ‘.gpg’ is always for binary keys, and all other file extensions will result in the error 'The key(s) in the keyring … are ignored as the file has an unsupported filetype'. For example, when using a key file '/etc/apt/keyrings/winehq-archive.key', it must be renamed to '/etc/apt/keyrings/winehq-archive.gpg' and the path in the file '/etc/apt/sources.list.d/' must also be corrected.
- Many functions have been transitioned to use the 'std::string' class instead of 'const char *' (the std::string_view class defined in the C++17 standard, which works more efficiently with strings by using references to existing data and avoiding unnecessary data copying until it is actually utilized in the code).
- Support for standalone verification of keyrings and performing the dearmor operation (converting ASCII-armored keys to binary format) has been implemented without calling apt-key.
- A Base64Decode function has been added.
Source: opennet.ru
