Package Management

Let’s look at Package Management in the Debian Family System.

dpkg is the underlying package manager for these systems; it can install, remove, and build packages. Unlike higher-level package management systems, it does not automatically download and install packages and satisfy their dependencies.

For Debian-based systems, the higher-level package management system is the apt(Advanced Package Tool) system of utilities. Generally, while each distribution within the Debian family uses apt, it creates its own user interface on top of it (for example,apt-get, aptitude, synaptic, Ubuntu Software Center, Update Manager, etc). Although apt repositories are generally compatible with each other, the software they contain generally isn’t. Therefore, most apt repositories target a particular distribution (like Ubuntu), and often software distributors ship with multiple repositories to support multiple distributions. The demonstration using the Ubuntu Software Center is shown later in this section.