The Debian package manager started out as a simple, command line utility, dpkg, with an additional utility called dselect that allowed more complex package selection and dependency resolution via a menu-based, curses interface. Eventually, additional utilities were developed to provide a better interface, better automatic dependency resolution, or both. The current standard package manager is Synaptic, a full-blown GUI application that runs in a graphical window manager, and provides extensive selection and reporting features.
