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8.2.7. Frontends: aptitude and synaptic
APT is a C++ program whose code mainly resides in the libapt-pkg shared library. Thanks to this shared library, it opened the door for the creation of user interfaces (front-ends), since the shared library code can easily be reused. Historically, apt-get was only designed as a test front-end for libapt-pkg but its success tends to obscure this fact.
Over time, despite the popularity of command line interfaces like apt and apt-get, various graph- ical interfaces were developed. We will take a look at two of those interfaces in this section: aptitude and synaptic.