Why can I not install auto-apt?

OS: Ubuntu 18.04

I was looking at the Ubuntu documentation on how to install auto-apt. However, when I run

apt-cache show auto-apt

I get

N: Unable to locate package auto-apt
E: No packages found

What happened to auto-apt ?

Edit. This is not a duplicate of the post apt search: limit to exact match . Below I am publishing some other results I got in the terminal.

$ apt search ^auto-apt$
Sorting... Done
Full Text Search... Done
$ sudo apt-get install auto-apt
[sudo] password for username:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package auto-apt

1 Answer

It seems auto-apt was last updated to version 0.3.24 in 2014, i.e., 5 years ago. Also, as of now xenial (16.04) seems to be the only supported release which still contains auto-apt in its repository information. In bionic (18.04) you can still download the deb package and install auto-apt. It's dependency is satisfiable. To install run

wget
sudo dpkg -i auto-apt_0.3.24_amd64.deb
sudo apt install -f

On a side note, since Ubuntu is a Debian based OS and all packages are imported from Debian itself, it seems Debian is also planning to drop auto-apt since it ain't available on Stretch or Buster.