History
The original effort that led to the apt-get program was the dselect replacement project known by its codename deity. This project was commissioned by Brian White, the Debian Release Manager at the time. The very first functional version of apt-get was called dpkg-get and was only intended to be a test program for the core library functions that would underpin the new UI.
Much of the original development of APT was done on IRC, so records have been lost. The 'Deity Creation Team' mailing list archives include only the major highlights.
The Deity name was abandoned as the official name for the project due to concerns over the religious nature of the name. The APT name was eventually decided after considerable internal and public discussion. Ultimately the name was proposed on IRC, accepted and then finalized on the mailing lists. As originally used, APT is not an acronym, but a proper name. The name gained mindshare during IRC discussions due to the variety of possible acronym expansions and it was ultimately decided that the official use of APT would be as a proper name and no official expansion would ever be presented by the team.
APT was introduced in 1998 and original test builds were circulated on IRC. The first Debian version that included it was Debian 2.1, released on 9 March 1999.
In the end the original goal of the Deity project of replacing the dselect UI was a failure. Work on the user interface (UI) portion of the project was abandoned (the UI directories were removed from the CVS system) after the first public release of apt-get. The response to APT as a dselect method and a command line utility was so great and positive that all development efforts focused on maintaining and improving the tool. It was not until much later that several independent people built UIs on top of the capable libapt-pkg.
The final push of the first APT era was to build a complete dpkg replacement (libapt-inst). This project was also a failure, however the partial code found a use as part of the secretive 'Project Betsy' program, which resulted in the highly efficient apt-ftparchive and libapt python bindings. After this, the original author faded away and maintainership of APT languished.
Eventually, a new team picked up the project, began to build new features and released version 0.6 of APT which introduced the Secure APT feature, using strong cryptographic signing to authenticate the package repositories.
Read more about this topic: Advanced Packaging Tool
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