Today, in celebration of DebConf 15 and David's talk
`This APT has Supercow Powers'
we uploaded a new pre-release of APT to experimental. Special thanks
to paultag for ACCEPTing the upload today. There's also a matching
python-apt upload, and a new aptitude should come soon as well.
It is the best pre-release ever.
Since the previous 1.1 pre-releases in experimental, and even much more
since the 1.0 series in unstable, APT has seen a huge amount of changes,
and we would love to get feedback from you on those!
Changes to the retrieval of files
---------------------------------
The Acquire system got reworked and is more transactional also much smarter
about what files to fetch and what compression formats to use. It will strictly
stick to the information provided in InRelease and will no longer do any
speculative fetching.
The apt in experimental also provides a fix for a long standing race-condition
that sometimes, when the archive is getting mirrored users may experience a
"hashsum mismatch" error. A new fetching schema is introduced called "by-hash"
where apt will fetch the Packages.xz data by its hashsum instead of its
name. Once the archive uses this the race condition should appear no more.
Furthermore, the progress reporting now shows the final repository a file
is downloaded from, so instead of 'httpredir.debian.org' it now reports
the real mirror, such as 'mirror.dc15.debconf.org'.
Oh, and APT can now download additional files from a repository, verifying
their signature. Other package can use that, for example, a software installer
can add a configuration to download AppStream data from the repository.
Changes to the pinning with apt_preferences(5)
----------------------------------------------
The pinning algorithm has been replaced using a new one. The old pinning
algorithm was broken in many cases with specific package names or patterns
like regular expressions.
We are sure that some corner cases involving specific package names or pattern
will change behaviour with this release, but we are also sure that the
previous behaviour was entirely broken and did not match the intention
of the users, as a large amount of bug reports over pinning have shown us.
Usability improvements
----------------------
* apt install foo_1.0_all.deb works now and apt will correctly resolve the
dependencies
* "apt-get build-dep foo_1.0_all.dsc" works now and apt will install the
build-dependencies of the given .dsc file
* The commands 'autoremove' and 'autoclean' can now be written as
'auto-remove' and 'auto-clean', respectively.
* The option '--upgradable' can now be written as '--upgradeable'
* When a package is specified on the command-line, and it already is the
current version, the version number is now shown in the message, that is,
instead of:
apt is already the newest version.
it now displays:
apt is already the newest version (1.1~exp9).
* Parsing the preferences file now produces an error message if the
Pin-Priority value exceeds the range of valid pin values (that is,
16-bit integers)
Please help translating!
------------------------
We broke a lot of translations, and we might break some more before the next
upload. Please help translating the new strings.
Deprecation of repository formats
---------------------------------
Support repositories without a release file is deprecated, and warnings will be
shown in such cases.
Unauthenticated repositories will trigger a warning message as well now but
continue downloading the metadata (Packages. Sources).
In the future apt will no longer download any metadata from
unauthenticated repositories unless you specify the --allow-unauthenticated
option or unless you mark the sources.list line with [trusted=yes].
Key pinning for sources
-----------------------
You can now pin a specific key or a keyring to a source by using the
signed-by option in your sources.list entry, where you can specify a
path to a keyring or a key finger print.
Local installs
--------------
For quite some time already, APT can install local packages using the
install command, and satisfy Build-Dependencies of build trees using
the build-dep command with a path.
Changes to automatic removal
----------------------------
Dependencies of meta packages are marked manually, and for oldlibs
packages, the information whether the package is automatically installed
moves to the old package.
Replacement of --force-yes
--------------------------
The --force-yes option has been deprecated and multiple new options have
been introduced to replace it:
--allow-downgrades
--allow-remove-essential
--allow-change-held packages
We hope the option names are long enough to scare you off more.
Other changes
-------------
* The 'changelog' command now has configurable changelog URLs. The
defaults support Debian, Ubuntu, Tanglu, and Ultimedia (the last
one from the census).
Other distributions might want to ship a config file for their
users.
* It's possible to disable the checking of the valid-until field
of Release files in your sources.list, for snapshot archives
and friends.
Also the moo command has new surprises for you, go and find them.
Cheers and enjoy!
The APT team
--
Julian Andres Klode - Debian Developer, Ubuntu Member
See http://wiki.debian.org/JulianAndresKlode and http://jak-linux.org/.
Be friendly, do not top-post, and follow RFC 1855 "Netiquette".
- If you don't I might ignore you.
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