Debian Releases APT 2.9.3 With New Package Solver

Debian's APT packaging tool is working its way toward the big APT 3.0 release. The APT 2.9 development series is underway and debuting last month was APT's new (CLI) user interface with a columnar display, colored text, and other improvements for this widely-used tool on Debian-based environments. APT 2.9.3 is out today as the newest development release and new to this version is a new package solver.

The new 3.0 solver "solver3" is a fully back-tracking solver, manually installed packages aren't promoted for removal, auto-remove is more aggressive, and other improvements over the current solver code.

For the time being this new solver on APT 2.9.3+ is only activated if using the "--solver 3.0" command line option. Debian developer Julian Andres Klode who spearheaded this new APT 3.0 solver has written a blog post with more technical details on this solver.

More details on the APT 2.9.3 changes for this development release via tracker.debian.org.