Debian’s APT 3.2 Released with History, Undo, Redo, and Rollback Support
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This release will be part of the upcoming Debian 14 "Forky" operating system series, due out in June-July 2027.
The Debian Project tagged today APT 3.2 as the latest stable release of this package manager for Debian-based distributions that lets you install, update, and remove packages from your system.
The biggest new feature in the APT 3.2 release is the long-anticipated rollback and history functionality that other package managers like DNF for Red Hat-based distros. This change was actually implemented in the development version 3.1.7, but it's now part of the stable APT 3.2 release.
The native rollback features have been implemented in the form of the following commands: history-list to show a list of history, history-info to show info on specific transactions, history-redo to redo transactions, history-undo to undo transactions, and history-rollback to rollback transactions.
The history/undo features work pretty much the same as with DNF if you used Fedora Linux or a similar distro before. With apt history-list you can see all the transactions, then you can use apt history-info ID to see what packages were installed, and you can revert the change with the apt history-undo ID command.
Since APT 3.1, this release introduces a much-improved solver, the internal engine responsible for resolving package dependencies, that now supports upgrade by source package and the ability to prevent your system from accidentally deleting essential software during an update on setups where binaries aren't published together for all architectures.
APT's solver is now also capable of sorting dependency targets against the current alternative, as well as allowing the removal of manually installed packages. Moreover, APT 3.2 introduces JSONL performance counter logging and the ability to prevent your computer from entering sleep while running the dpkg command.
APT 3.2 will be part of the upcoming Debian 14 "Forky" release, due out in June-July 2027, but you will be able to enjoy the native rollback functionality in the forthcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS (Resolute Racoon) operating system that Canonical plans to officially release later this month, on April 23rd, 2026.
Meanwhile, Debian Sid (Unstable) users can already enjoy the APT 3.2 release just by updating their installations with the sudo apt update && sudo apt install apt commands. More details on today's APT 3.2 release can be found on tracker.debian.org.
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