I want to add that adding color was essentially the last step in the redesign. It does not play an important role overall, it literally can't.

You'll find if you look at the posts in https://mastodon.social/@julia... from 11th/12th that the color landed fairly close to the end of the first round per request to make it look more like a diff.

The evolution was:
1. 10:36 PM initial terse UI proof of concept: use less words (https://mastodon.social/@juliank/112254503514992757)
2. 10:51 PM add spaces and hide the progress from reading lists and building dependency tree (https://mastodon.social/@juliank/112254562137228107)
3. 11:22 PM merge the columnar display branch from 2 years ago (https://mastodon.social/@juliank/112254684145776880)

Friday:
4. 11:45 AM removing duplicate "additional packages will be installed" section, instead moving dependencies out of the main section (https://mastodon.social/@juliank/112257600155511076)
5. 12:33 PM adding color for popey locally and then grewing to like it (https://mastodon.social/@juliank/112257793195180589)
6. 02:45 PM opening merge request

All times in CEST.

At some point I moved the removals to the end, essentially reordering the blocks by priority without (or well as little as possible) breaking reasoning context (i.e. Suggested packages need to come after Installing because they are suggested by the packages being installed).

I like to believe that even without colors as it was for most of the time in the evolution this is a big step up from the wall of text you had before in terms of easily making sense of it.

I understand your concern but I want to point out that red/green here resembles the colors you normally use for a diff; as the solution is a diff for your package. That's why red and green are sadly the natural choices because somebody picked that decades ago.

For colorless systems, there's emphasis on dangerous actions due to their heading being all uppercase. It's not particularly good emphasis, but it's better than before when the upper case was inside a longer sentence (people actually complain about seeing upper case now).

Essentially we have three categories of package lists that can be displayed:

- Non-destructive actions that will be performed, like installs and upgrades
- Destructive actions like removals and downgrades (red and yellow color coded to match error/warning)
- Notes that show packages that can be autoremoved or suggested packages that will not be installed, or packages not upgraded (usually due to the archive issues)

The first goal when you look at the screen is to draw your attention away from the "notes" kind of things such that you can easily glance what the changes are that actually will be performed.

The second goal should be to focus on any destructive actions in particular such that you spot the common issue where you get many packages removed due to conflicts.

Now the problem without colors all we have left to draw your attention is bold/bright, underline and italic.

Now assume I mark removals bold because I want to draw your attention to it, I don't have a good way left to draw your attention away from other notes because underline and italic are awkward.

Of course you can reconfigure every color in APT with the APT::Color option space but it needs more documentation.

We have to think about apt-*s future in about 3-4 years. With apt(8) now getting versioned output you can get the same "scripting interface stability" of 5 years as for APT's ABI (and mostly API) you will just need to request it. But really either interface is not made for scripting.

It's sort of all, input, output and behavior, to give examples:

Behavior: apt deletes packages after it is done installing them, whereas apt-get doesn't
Input: apt-get accepts both regular expressions and glob expressions for package names, and it doesn't anchor the regular expressions, so if there is e.g. no package "apt." and you "install apt." it matches every package containing the substring "apt" and another character following it. apt was made safer to only accept regular expressions starting with ^ or ending with $, i.e. anchored, and otherwise only accepts "*" for glob patterns to get non-ambiguous behavior.
Output: The post is enough I suppose.

So assuming you have green/red deficiency you don't reconfigure the 7 colors in your terminal palette to preserve the distinction?

For what it's worth, don't let the image confuse you, it may look totally different on your screen, there is only "green" and no shades of it in the basic ANSI colors. i.e. if I set the palette to xterm, it's almost neon, very shrill. Same for the red. I like more muted colors on my screen, hence I use the Tango palette.

But of course you can reconfigure each color by name (apt::color::green, etc.) to your liking if you don't configure it centrally in your terminal or want different colors than for e.g. git diff, turn off colors entirely, and soon you can set apt::color::action::install or similar so you can set that to e.g. nyan rather than having to edit the green color.

The 2nd version missed a bit of the original edit that got lost due to technical limitations...

updates (bugfixes, security, ocassional backports) are released when they pass QA

Running Ubuntu devel on desktop is fairly pratical IMO. It doesn't break every year.

You seem somewhat confused about this. CentOS Stream essentially works like an Ubuntu stable release - updates are released when they pass QA. It's not like you install CentOS Stream 9 and it incrementally transforms itself into CentOS Stream 10.

So what do you use? Another RHEL rebuild? I guess SUSE Enterprise might work, but I'm not sure how things happen there. And Debian is a weird in between place in that it does have the point releases but then they replace the existing stable repository on a flag day, so all systems would get the upgrades without opt-in on the flag day (arguably it does not support unattended upgrades, and the patches are far more minimal than enterprise distros, as only critical issues are fixed).

Because people started drinking milk from other mammals, so the body adapted to a longer milk-fed period.

Burger doesn't look like burger because that's a natural form. Same for cheese, it's not natural either. Or sausages, well to some extend the form is given by the natural casing, but people picked that casing because it was convenient, not a necessity.

Now they just need to produce lactose?

> Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. Let's unwrap this. Well, we don't kill humans to get the transplants, they're already (brain-)dead, and you need to get consent from the family. Do you consider that to be exploitation and cruelty to animals (which humans are a part of)? So I think this is vegan *as long* as there's no way to "print" organs. Veganism isn't a SAT problem, it's a MaxSAT problem.

Meanwhile in Germany, federal departments are not allowed to have facebook profiles because privacy.

Yes, BSD was based on UNIX but completely rewritten to avoid copyright as it was universally understood back then. With Oracle's change to make APIs themselves copyrightable, BSDs would once again be derivative works of UNIX as well.