APT

The Advanced Packaging Tool and its various frontends form the package management core of Debian and Debian-derived distributions such as SprezzOS.

Relevant man pages

• deb(5) -- The deb binary package format, since Debian 0.93. Older versions are documented in deb-old(5).
• deb-version(5) -- Version number semantics.

Working with the database

• apt-get(8) -- command line interactive package tool
• dpkg(1) -- command line local package database management
• aptitude(8) -- modern ncurses interactive package tool.
• dselect(1) -- horrible old ncurses interactive package tool. Avoid at all costs.
• apt-cache(8), dpkg-query(1) -- query the database

Creating packages

• deb-control(5) -- The control files required to generate binary packages from source.
  • A given source package maps to a single control file, in which it is described.
  • A given source package can yield one or more binary packages. Each will have an entry in the control file.
• dch(1), debchange(1) -- Tools for managing changelog files.

Working with debs

• dpkg-deb(1) -- Unpacks, packs, dumps information about local .deb files.