The past year in APT

Apt is used by a lot of people every day to update their systems, install software, and remove software on Debian, Ubuntu, and other derivatives. Some people actually forked an old apt and run it on some kind of fruit phones. The APT library is also used by aptitude, a formidable ncurses frontend.

This talk discusses three major topics of APT development in the past year:

Firstly, security improvements such as acquire method sandboxing and the deprecation of SHA1 support.

Secondly, performance improvements: Between 1.1 and 1.2 there were many commits improving performance, both for the update command and building the cache itself (hello, phones!).

Thirdly, we will take a look at the new pinning engine introduced in 1.1 at last year's DebConf, how it is different from the older engine, and why it is much better and actually does what you mean instead of nonsense.

• Video