The internal architecture of apt management system?

Question

To make it more concrete, what's the relationship among apt-get, apt-file, apt-cache, aptitude and dpkg? I know that aptitude is the friendly front end to dpkg - so is apt-get, but less friendly. So is aptitude built upon apt-get? Is all of the apt*s the front-end of dpkg?

Thanks.

Answer 1

• dpkg is the main workhorse and database keeper.

• apt-get is a commandline front-end and provides dependency checking.

• aptitude is commandline & ncurses front-end that provides a terminal GUI (as you say, friendlier than apt-get).

All the other apt-* are tools to do specific things:

• apt-cache performs searches on your system's local package cache (including what it knows about enabled repositories).

• apt-file is used for searching for particular files in the cache. While dpkg -S can tell you what package an installed file came from, apt-file can tell you what files an uninstalled package will install.

• apt-src is a bit like apt-get for source packages. doesn't require root.