APT 2.2 released

APT 2.2.0 marks the freeze of the 2.1 development series and the start of the 2.2 stable series. Let’s have a look at what changed compared to 2.2. Many of you who run Debian testing or unstable, or Ubuntu groovy or hirsute will already have seen most of those changes. New features Various patterns related to dependencies, such as ?depends are now available (2.1.16) The Protected field is now supported. It replaces the previous Important field and is like Essential, but only for installed packages (some minor more differences maybe in terms of ordering the installs). The update command has gained an --error-on=any option that makes it error out on any failure, not just what it considers persistent ons. The rred method can now be used as a standalone program to merge pdiff files APT now implements phased updates. Phasing is used in Ubuntu to slow down and control the roll out of updates in the -updates pocket, but has previously only been available to desktop users using update-manager. Other behavioral changes The kernel autoremoval helper code has been rewritten from shell in C++ and now runs at run-time, rather than at kernel install time, in order to correctly protect the kernel that is running now, rather than the kernel that was running when we were installing the newest one.