APT frontends and the migration
APT frontends have to be modified to properly support archive signature verification. While most (if not all) frontends continue to work well when recompiled against the APT 0.6 libraries, changes are necessary so that the frontends properly informs the user about potential archive tampering.
aptitude
The version in experimental (0.3.1 as of this writing) contains the necessary changes; it should report signature verification failures. (This is not true if aptitude operations are started from the command line, as reported by Michael Vogt.) However, besides that, a major internal reorganization took place. It is felt that these changes are not ready for sarge; it should be released with a version from the 0.2.x branch. (Source: Daniel Burrows
)
At this stage, this issue should be ignored. We may need further changes in the verification code, and it makes sense to postpone the necessary backport until the final code is available in the 0.3.x branch.
Luca Berruti provides aptitude 0.2.x packages compiled against APT 0.6. Andrea Mennucc also reports that aptitude 0.2.x runs fine when compiled against APT 0.6.
gnome-apt
Upon startup, gnome-apt 0.4.7-1.2 warns that it is still in alpha stage. If this is still true, it is not ready for release, with or without signature verification support.
Other Resources
APT frontends and the migration
APT frontends have to be modified to properly support archive signature verification. While most (if not all) frontends continue to work well when recompiled against the APT 0.6 libraries, changes are necessary so that the frontends properly informs the user about potential archive tampering.
This web page collects background information on the Debian's migration to APT version 0.6.
Showstoppers in the APT package
This web page collects issues in the
aptpackage which prevent the migration to APT 0.6, but are not directly related to implementation details of archive signature verification.