APT

The RPM Package Manager (RPM) is a powerful package management system capable of building computer software from the source into easily distributable packages; installing, updating, and uninstalling packaged software; querying detailed information about the packaged software, whether installed or not; and verifying the integrity of packaged software and resulting software installation. The package’s metadata is stored in the RPM header. The header is a binary data structure that stores single pieces of data in tags. Each tag has a pre-defined meaning and data type. These are not stored in the header itself but need to be known by the code reading the header. In the header, the tags are only referred to by their number. Each tag is either of a plain scalar type or is an array of one of these types. While not enforced by the type system the RPM code assumes that tags belonging together have the same number of entries.

Aptitude is an Ncurses and command-line based front-end to numerous Apt libraries, which are also used by Apt, the default Debian package manager. Aptitude is text-based and run from a terminal. A mutt-like syntax for matching packages in a flexible manner. Mark packages as "automatically installed" or "manually installed" so that packages can be auto-removed when no longer required (feature available in Apt, too, since quite a few Debian releases). Preview of actions about to be taken with different colors marking different actions. The ability to interactively retrieve and display the Debian changelog of all available official packages. Score-based dependency resolver which is more suitable for interactive dependency resolution with additional hints from the user like "I don't want that part of the solution but keep that other part of the solution for your next try". Apt's dependency resolver on the other hand is optimized for good "one-shot" solutions.