nala an improved apt

[craigevil]

volian-team / nala · GitLab

Debian Salsa Gitlab

salsa.debian.org

Volian Linux / nala · GitLab

GitLab.com

gitlab.com

Nala is a front-end for libapt-pkg. Specifically we interface using the python-apt api.
Especially for newer users it can be hard to understand what apt is trying to do when installing or upgrading.
We aim to solve this by not showing some redundant messages, formatting the packages better, and using color to
show specifically what will happen with a package during install, removal, or an upgrade.

usage: nala [--options] <command>

commands:
 
    install            install packages
    remove             remove packages
    purge              purge packages
    update             update package list and upgrade the system
    upgrade            alias for update
    fetch              fetches fast mirrors to speed up downloads
    show               show package details
    history            show transaction history
    clean              clears out the local repository of retrieved package files

optional arguments:
  -h, --help           show this help message and exit
  -y, --assume-yes     assume 'yes' to all prompts and run non-interactively
  -d, --download-only  package files are only retrieved, not unpacked or installed
  -v, --verbose        logs extra information for debugging
  --no-update          skips updating the package list
  --no-autoremove      stops nala from autoremoving packages
  --remove-essential   allows the removal of essential packages
  --raw-dpkg           skips all formatting and you get raw dpkg output
  --update             updates the package list
  --debug              logs extra information for debugging
  --version            show program's version number and exit
  --license            reads the licenses of software compiled in and then reads the GPLv3

Steps to install:

git clone https://gitlab.com/volian/nala
cd nala
python3 ./setup.py build
sudo python3 ./setup.py install

It also has a apt repo:

echo "deb [arch=amd64,arm64,armhf] http://deb.volian.org/volian/ scar main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/volian-archive-scar-unstable.list
wget -qO - https://deb.volian.org/volian/scar.key | sudo tee /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/volian-archive-scar-unstable.gpg > /dev/null
sudo apt update && sudo apt install nala

Works great and looks great compared to plain old apt. Give it a try.