Aptitude
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The computer program aptitude is a front-end to APT. It displays a list of software packages and allows the user to interactively pick packages to install or remove. It was initially created for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, but has appeared in RPM-based distributions as well (such as Conectiva).
aptitude is based on the ncurses computer terminal library, with which it provides an interface that incorporates some elements commonly seen in graphical user interfaces (GUIs) (such as pull-down menus).
History
aptitude was created in 1999. At the time, two other terminal-based APT front-ends were available: the dselect program, which had been used to install Debian since before APT was created, and the console-apt program, a project that was considered to be the heir apparent to dselect. aptitude was created to experiment with a more object-oriented design than that used in console-apt, in the hope that this would result in a more flexible program with a broader set of features.
Aptitude-screen-shot.png
The first public release of aptitude was version 0.0.1 on November 18th, 1999. It was very limited: it had the ability to view the list of available packages, but could not actually download or install any packages. By version 0.0.4a, this capability had been added, along with many other improvements; this version was included in Debian 2.2 ("potato").
In late 2000, the entire user interface module was rewritten; a new architecture was created, based on the [[libsigc++]] callback library and concepts from modern widget toolkits such as GTK and Qt. This enabled the interface to become much more similar to GUIs than it had been previously, with features such as pull-down menus and pop-up dialogs. One of aptitude's surprisingly popular features, a tiny implementation of Minesweeper, was added at this time. The first official aptitude release following this rewrite was 0.2.0. aptitude 0.2.11.1 was released with Debian 3.0 ("Woody"). By this time, the console-apt project (renamed to deity) had been effectively abandoned by its maintainers, and it was removed from woody.
At the time of writing, aptitude is regarded as the primary terminal-based alternative to dselect, and may even replace it in the near future. Other package management tools based on APT include the GUI-based Synaptic and the command-line program wajig.