[Wishlist] apt command: add more subcommands to autocomplete, help and manpage

[Bruno Nova]

It seems has a lot more subcommands than those listed in the manpage or the help message.
For example, "download", "policy", "changelog" and "dist-upgrade" all work, and they aren't listed.
Maybe apt supports all subcommands from apt-get and apt-cache?

However those subcommands aren't listed in the manpage or the help message.
They also don't have autocomplete, which makes using them a pain, and makes me use apt-get and apt-cache instead.

It would be great if all those subcommand were listed in the manpage and help message, and if there was autocomplete for them!

[Julian Andres Klode (juliank)]

All commands have bash completion since recent releases (1.3~exp2, 1.2.13). The former is in yakkety, the latter will hit xenial at some point (or actually 1.2.14 or 1.2.15 will). We just have another bug preventing 1.3~exp3 from being in yakkety, so we cannot start the 1.2.14 transition in xenial (as the fixes would not have been tested in yakkety first otherwise). See bug 1573547.

The help messages only display the most commonly used commands by design. Repeating everything from the apt-get and apt-cache manual pages in the apt one would be quite wasteful. It's also distracting: apt is the easier interface, and those options are more advanced things we would like to hide from users not knowing them already.

 They are supported so people who know them from apt-get and apt-cache can just use them with apt, but we're not going to advertise them all over the place.

[Bruno Nova (brunonova)]

Great! Thanks for the explanation and for the link!

I think this bug can now be marked as invalid, or as a duplicate of Bug #1573547.