APT 3.3 has landed in Debian Unstable, bringing a notable user-facing change to Debian’s package management tooling: the removal of the long-standing warning about APT’s unstable command-line interface.
For years, users running the apt command in some contexts saw a warning that its CLI interface was unstable and should be used with caution in scripts. Debian recommended apt-get and apt-cache for scripting, while apt served as the more user-friendly front end for interactive use. I’m talking about this:
That warning is now gone. According to the changelog, APT can request a specific CLI version through the new --cli-version flag, allowing older command-line interfaces to be deprecated at a more reasonable pace. As a result, the generic warning is no longer necessary.
APT 3.3 also fixes a probability mistake in Phased-Update-Percentage, the mechanism that rolls out updates gradually instead of pushing them immediately to all users. Phased updates reduce the impact of problematic package updates by limiting their initial exposure.
Moreover, the release improves the package acquisition code. It fixes transaction handling when pkgAcquire::Run is cancelled and changes the order in which InRelease metadata is committed after other transaction items.
On the usability side, the history list scales to the screen width, and command shortening has been optimized. APT pattern parsing also fixes Pre-Depends, addressing a package relationship parsing issue.
Last but not least, the codebase now uses more modern C++ constructs in several places, including std::span, range-based loops, emplace, and make_unique. The update also fixes several minor memory leaks in APT’s method handling code.
For more details, see the changelog.
APT 3.3 is currently in Debian Unstable, where new package versions are tested before migrating further through Debian’s development process.
