Rationalizing Debian

Debian's package tools are famous for their reliability. However, their weakness is that they developed over decades with little centralized planning. As a result, the Debian archives now list 44 package utilities starting with "apt" alone [1], each with its own set of options. Add other packages, such as dpkg and alien, and the total is closer to 60. Wajig [2] reduces this complexity by uniting package management under a single command with self-explanatory sub-commands.

Wajig has been an open secret in the Debian world for two decades. Graham Williams of Togaware, wajig's original developer, explains that users had trouble remembering not only Debian's commands but also "the extra greps and awks and finds that would be commonly used in conjunction with them. I was also regularly coming across tips and tricks for managing the system from various newsgroups and blog posts. I used to write them down in documents and cheat sheets, but then started to bring them together into a single command."

Because package management is an administrative function, Williams wrote it as a command-line tool. "Whilst GUIs can deliver quite a bit of simplicity and yet still offer quite a bit of power," Williams says, they can't do everything that we do from the command line."

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