@Zanna I wasn't strictly correct to say you'd have to check out the repo multiple times from a remote to work on multiple branches. You'd probably want to do it that way (this is all assuming you couldn't avoid, or chose not to avoid, the situation of having each file on a separate branch in the first place), and the alternatives are comparably cumbersome.

But you can actually have a local repository with multiple working trees, each of which can have a different branch checked out. See git help worktree for details.

Really??

It's true that local deb files can be installed with APT but I have had problems trying to do that before

I mean is dpkg -i really obsolete? AFAIK APT is a "front-end" for dpkg and it still calls dpkg to install packages. I think half of the statement is incorrect.

I guess fkraim meant that there's no reason to run that command any more, since we can use APT (and it automatically performs dependency resolution so you won't need to run sudo apt install -f afterwards) but I probably wouldn't use that word

Indeed.

@Zanna Better than "deprecated." :)

@EliahKagan definitely haha

I was going to say that of course dpkg -i is still used because APT runs dpkg. But I realize I'm not sure that's actually the case. It may use a library rather than executing dpkg.

Though... its error message sure do make it look like it's literally running dpkg.

> APT can be considered a front-end to dpkg, friendlier than the older dselect front-end. While dpkg performs actions on individual packages, APT manages relations (especially dependencies) between them, as well as sourcing and management of higher-level versioning decisions (release tracking and version pinning).

@Kulfy I wasn't sure based on the "can be considered" phrasing there. So I checked:

ek@Ilex:~$ sudo rm /usr/bin/dpkg
ek@Ilex:~$ type -a dpkg
bash: type: dpkg: not found
ek@Ilex:~$ sudo apt install --reinstall dpkg
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 reinstalled, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 1,140 kB of archives.
After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-updates/main amd64 dpkg amd64 1.19.0.5ubuntu2.1 [1,140 kB]

So yes, it does use and rely on the dpkg executable to install packages.

Though... it doesn't use the -i or --install option to dpkg. After I put dpkg back (from the above), I tried this:

ek@Ilex:~$ sudo mv /usr/bin/dpkg{,.real}
ek@Ilex:~$ sudo tee /usr/bin/dpkg >/dev/null <<'EOF'
> #!/bin/sh
> printf 'DPKG %s\n' "$*"
> dpkg.real "$@"
> EOF
ek@Ilex:~$ sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/dpkg
ek@Ilex:~$ sudo apt install --reinstall bash
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 reinstalled, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B/614 kB of archives.
After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used.