2 - Raspberry PI Community Projects

➨ http://www.apt-get.org/
The mentors.debian.net site is also interesting, since it gathers packages created by candidates
to the status of official Debian developer or by volunteers who wish to create Debian packages
without going through that process of integration. These packages are made available without
any guarantee regarding their quality; make sure that you check their origin and integrity and
then test them before you consider using them in production.
COMMUNITY
The debian.net sites
The debian.net domain is not an official resource of the Debian project. Each
Debian developer may use that domain name for their own use. These websites
can contain unofficial services (sometimes personal sites) hosted on a
machine which does not belong to the project and set up by Debian developers,
or even prototypes about to be moved on to debian.org. Two reasons
can explain why some of these prototypes remain on debian.net: either no one
has made the necessary effort to transform it into an official service (hosted
on the debian.org domain, and with a certain guarantee of maintenance), or
the service is too controversial to be officialized.
Installing a package means giving root rights to its creator, because they decide on the contents
of the initialization scripts which are run under that identity. Official Debian packages are created
by volunteers who have been co-opted and reviewed and who can seal their packages so
that their origin and integrity can be checked.
In general, be wary of a package whose origin you don't know and which isn't hosted on one of
the official Debian servers: evaluate the degree to which you can trust the creator, and check
the integrity of the package.
➨ http://mentors.debian.net/
GOING FURTHER
Old package versions:
snapshot.debian.org
A new service (introduced in April 2010) can be used to “go backwards in time”
and to find an old version of a package. It can be used for example to identify
which version of a package introduced a regression, and more concretely, to
come back to the former version while waiting for the regression fix.
6.2. aptitude and apt-get Commands
APT is a vast project, whose original plans included a graphical interface. It is based on a library
which contains the core application, and apt-get is the first interface — command-line based
— which was developed within the project.
Numerous other graphical interfaces then appeared as external projects: synaptic, aptitude
(which includes both a text mode interface and a graphical one — even if not complete yet),
wajig, etc. The most recommended interface, aptitude, is the one used during the installation
of Debian. Since its command-line syntax is very similar to apt-get's, we will be focusing on
aptitude in the examples given in this section. When there are major differences between
aptitude and apt-get, these differences will be detailed.
106 The Debian Administrator's Handbook