Use apt instead of apt-get?

[PeterBowman]

As @jgvictores found out, apt-get is just a another layer below apt (see e.g. apt-cache). The latter provides color feedback during data fetch, installation, etc., which is so cool.

See also https://askubuntu.com/a/446484.

[jgvictores]

I'm using apt by habit now, but are we aware if at least most popular Debian-based distros (Ubuntu/Mint/...) and Debian itself provide this command? How about in a bit out-of-date versions (aka Debian 6.0)?

[PeterBowman]

Per this, this and the link above, It's available since Ubuntu Trusty. Linux Mint, which I'm not familiar with at all, lists an apt backport since the Serena release (ref), but this answer and Linux Mint Releases suggest that it may be available since Qiana (v17).

I'm afraid we are not so lucky on Debian Squeeze (6.0). There is an admin/apt package on main for i386 (pkgs):

Package: apt
Priority: important
Section: admin
Installed-Size: 6116
Maintainer: APT Development Team <deity@lists.debian.org>
Architecture: i386
Version: 0.8.10.3+squeeze1
Replaces: manpages-pl (<< 20060617-3~)
Provides: libapt-pkg4.10
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.3.4), libgcc1 (>= 1:4.1.1), libstdc++6 (>= 4.4.0), zlib1g (>= 1:1.2.2.3), debian-archive-keyring, gnupg
Suggests: aptitude | synaptic | wajig, dpkg-dev, apt-doc, bzip2, lzma, python-apt
Conflicts: python-apt (<< 0.7.93.2~)
Filename: pool/main/a/apt/apt_0.8.10.3+squeeze1_i386.deb
Size: 2171308
MD5sum: a823518b46a3e4efb68a703521d43256
SHA1: 802d335573141644f3d20d7cb087084c3ef5c3b5
SHA256: f5bb9476c290a755f3a2aabd91ef59dc7a73b9fc36ba018191e794f3ea82d76d
Description: Advanced front-end for dpkg
 This is Debian's next generation front-end for the dpkg package manager.
 It provides the apt-get utility and APT dselect method that provides a
 simpler, safer way to install and upgrade packages.
 .
 APT features complete installation ordering, multiple source capability
 and several other unique features, see the Users Guide in apt-doc.
Tag: admin::package-management, hardware::storage, hardware::storage:cd, interface::commandline, network::client, protocol::{ftp,http,ipv6}, role::program, suite::debian, use::downloading, use::searching, works-with::software:package

...but it doesn't provide an apt executable per Contents-i386.gz (ref). However, I found these instead:

usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/bin/apt                           java/openjdk-6-jdk
usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.26/bin/apt                      non-free/java/sun-java6-jdk

Not sure what it is, though. No backports available unless I missed something.

[PeterBowman]

Newer Debian distros started providing usr/bin/apt since Jessie: https://packages.debian.org/jessie/i386/apt/filelist.

[jgvictores]

I guess we can update it everywhere except for Debain 6.0 (yarp-devices) and OpenRAVE on Ubuntu 12.04, then!

[jgvictores]

Learning from here and this in general we can learn to visualize all the appearances of apt-get with (note that this is recursive, does not need to be done inside final leave directories):

find -type f -exec grep --color=always apt-get {} +  # Will refer to this as [1]

Therefore, a brute force replacement would be (also recursive):

find -type f -exec sed -i 's/apt-get/apt/g' {} +  # Will refer to this as [2]

With [2] that should be enough. We could see that [1] returns nothing, and we'd need to replace apt-get by aptto see any results. We could also see this via git diff.

To close this issue, we however, in addition have to manually restore the apt-get of the sections related to Debian 6.0 and Ubuntu 12.04.

PS: For repositories other than this one, I've opened roboticslab-uc3m/questions-and-answers#37 .

[rsantos88]

Done it here:

• replacement of apt-get by apt except in installation sections with Ubuntu 12.04 and debian 6.0
• sections with Ubuntu 12.04 and debian 6.0 (not changed): install-cmake.md , install-yarp.md and install-openrave.md

[jgvictores]

Done at #25 !!