Adding "groups" support to apt package manager

apovalyaev

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Hi there! Hope you're doing well!

It has been for a while since that time the first package manager (like apt) was introduced to Linux. The list of packages available has grown since then a lot, and is becoming wider and wider. And for a particular host, the list of packages available for installation is also depends on the list of recognized repositories (through /etc/apt/sources apt update or so). It is just a question of "apt list", and you'll see the whole list of packages which can be downloaded and installed locally.

However, there are some packages which actually provide the same functionality (or very similar) and can be considered as an alternative to each other. For example, if you're a C/C++ developer, you're blessed with a great list of different C/C++ compression development libraries (like LZO (liblzo2-dev), LZ4 (liblz4-dev), ZIP (libzip-dev), ZLIB (zlib1g-dev), ZSTD (libzstd-dev), BROTLI (libbrotli-dev), LZF (liblzf-dev), LZMA (liblzma-dev), SNAPPY (libsnappy-dev), LIBRACHIVE-dev (multi-format) and even more).

Is there some way to group them? So that, all the alternatives described could be found by just one CLI command.

For example, you submit a CLI command, something like "apt list-group | grep compression | grep dev" and you will get the whole list of all the development libraries which can be used to support compression in C/C++ programs. I consider it might be useful while providing different nice use-cases.
 


Hello and welcome.

Moving this to Command Line.

Chris Turner
wizardfromoz
 

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