An experimental branch of the APT 2.7 (Advanced Package Tool) package management toolkit has been released, on the basis of which, after stabilization, a stable release 2.8 will be prepared, which will be integrated into Debian Testing and will be included in the Debian 13 release, and will also be added to the Ubuntu package base. In addition to Debian and its derivatives, the APT-RPM fork is also used by some distributions based on the rpm package manager, such as PCLinuxOS and ALT Linux.
The new release adds initial support for snapshots, controlled by the "--snapshot" ("-S") option, with which you can contact repository servers that support snapshots and select a specific state of the repository archive. For example, by specifying "--snapshot 20230502T030405Z" you can work with a snapshot of the state of the repository, committed on May 2, 2023 at 03:04:05. Snapshots are configured in the APT::Snapshot section of the sources-list files. The new version also implements the β-updateβ (β-Uβ) option, which allows you to automatically run the βapt updateβ operation during the execution of package installation or upgrade commands (apt install or apt upgrade) to synchronize indexes before opening the cache and processing sources. list.
Source: opennet.ru