“Advanced Package Tool” :
Package manager developed by “The Debian project” association and released freely under the GPL open source license .
As for Unix-like operating systems based on Debian ( such as Ubuntu or Linux Mint ) , it automates the process of :
- installing new packages or removing existing ones
- updating packages lists
- upgrading each package of these lists
- displaying detailed information about a given package , synthesized from a /etc/apt/sources.list file
( Knowing that a package is an archive containing metadata , files and dependencies lists related to a software )
In particular , by means of two types of command tools ; apt-get and apt-cache .