Linux @lemmy.ml schizoidman @lemmy.ml 2 mo. ago

Debian spices up APT package manager with a dash of color

www.theregister.com Debian spices up APT package manager with a dash of color

2.9 gives a taste of what's to come

46 comments

Kinda miffed they didn't include a screenshot of the colors, but I'm guessing the readability will be vastly better!
- Here are some from another article. It looks really nice.
  
  Previous
  
  New
  
  https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2024/04/apt-3-0-colours-columns-new-ui
  
  I hate it, makes me look much less like a hacker while installing pre-built software from other people
  
  that is vastly more readable, not only thanks to the colors, but the indentation, new lines, and straightforward section titles are a huge improvement.
  
  I love this change, actually, I'm not a boring-text purist. Proper categorizing of data allows me to spot things at a glance much easier, and I'm all in favor of anything that can improve efficiency and understanding, especially for new folks, so we can improve product adoption.
  
  I didn't know I needed multi-coloured terminal text until I saw the 2nd image. It looks so much more readable!
  
  Looks like how zypper does it
  
  looks splendid :3
- There are some screenshots in this article:
  
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-APT-2.9-Released
Nala is a much nicer frontend for apt, which includes additional features like parallel downloads
- I have heard of Nala before but have never actually taken the time to install it. Based on your comment, I just checked it out on one of the Debian 12 systems I run. Turns out it was right in the repos.
  
  Wow. So good. I cannot believe it took me this long. Jealous of it on the Arch installs now.
  
  I installed it on Ubuntu 22.04 as well but it was not there when I searched. I had to add the jammy-backports repo first.
  
  Thank you for the push.
- i tought apt already did this if you were downloading from different mirrors?
10 year old bug?

What are they talking about, that bug report is from 2014‽

... Fuck
Not one single screen shot.
I'm using nala for some time now, it is pretty 😀 (it is a frontend for apt, with colours, history, undo, etc)
If you're anything like me and find coloured text is often unreadable in a terminal window, here's the list of how to address the issue:

http://no-color.org/
- Agreed. I haven't read the article yet, but my first thought was "how am I going to turn that off"
  
  Probably it will have an option --no-color or something as well as config. Somebody will ask for it for a specific niche use case and it might not be hard to implement within apt so they add it
  
  It'll be fun filtering all the color codes out of build logs, that's for sure. :/
And this is what Debian users will be doing more often : Installing, uninstalling and installing software just because APT and nala is so pretty and colorful. It adds a whole new flavor to the art of Procrastination 😁
Wait, when does this drop for Bookworm 12 stable branch? This looks kinky.
- Stable means unchanging, so probably never. If it's just cosmetic with no new functionality, maybe, but usually not.
- When Debian 12 becomes Debian 13. It says in the article.
- It won't
Cool now do parallel downloads and I'll quit using Nala
Y'all need Nala. Debian should just make it their default and call it a day.
- Nala is too cool but kinda messy if you resize terminal. It puts things in box hsing unicode characters and nake it look like some gui. Also nala is using python-apt and it also require apt. This brings out of the box ecperience with apt itself
  
  Edit: typos
This is the best summary I could come up with:

Major updates to Debian's Advanced Packaging Tool don't come along very often, but APT 2.9 is here with a significant facelift.

It's only just over a year since we reported on APT 2.6, development of which was spurred by the inclusion of soft-loadable firmware in the default installation media for Debian 12.

It also lists the important section of packages to be removed last so they don't scroll off the top of the screen during large operations.

The Reg FOSS desk suspects that the changes are in part aimed at catching up with two other packaging tools.

The DNF packaging tool used in Fedora, Red Hat and the RHELatives has attractively formatted output like this … but closer to home, Nala, an alternative command-line package-management tool for Debian and Ubuntu, brings some of the DNF look and feel to .deb-based distros.

We have recommended Nala previously and Teejeetech's Snap and Flatpak-free Ubuntu remix Zinc – now renamed Asmi – includes it as standard.

The original article contains 377 words, the summary contains 163 words. Saved 57%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Take that snap!
i tought debian didnt have colored terminals by default? at least my server installs don't.
- "Color terminal" isn't a thing. Applications can choose to output ANSI escape codes which most terminal emulators will render as color changes. Whether and which colors get used depends on the value of $TERM, which informs the application of the capabilities of the terminal emulator.
  
  So if your remote servers don't have color, either $TERM isn't being set or its value is unknown to the server. Most modern terminal emulators support at least the same escape codes as xterm-256color though so you can always try to export that.
nala

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