Debian's APT packaging tool is working its way toward the big APT 3.0 release. The APT 2.9 development series is underway and debuting last month was [1]APT's new (CLI) user interface with a columnar display, colored text, and other improvements for this widely-used tool on Debian-based environments. APT 2.9.3 is out today as the newest development release and new to this version is a new package solver.

The new 3.0 solver "solver3" is a fully back-tracking solver, manually installed packages aren't promoted for removal, auto-remove is more aggressive, and other improvements over the current solver code.

For the time being this new solver on APT 2.9.3+ is only activated if using the " --solver 3.0 " command line option. Debian developer Julian Andres Klode who spearheaded this new APT 3.0 solver has written a [2]blog post with more technical details on this solver.

More details on the APT 2.9.3 changes for this development release via [3]tracker.debian.org .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-APT-2.9-Released

[2] https://blog.jak-linux.org/2024/05/14/solver3/

[3] https://tracker.debian.org/news/1529821/accepted-apt-293-source-into-unstable/