Aptitude is a package manager with a number of useful features, including: a mutt-like syntax for matching packages in a flexible manner, dselect-like persistence of user actions, the ability to retrieve and display the debian changelog of most packages, and a command-line mode similar to that of apt-get.

this package contains the debugging symbols for aptitude. you only need these if you want to generate debugging backtraces of aptitude; if you do, you probably also want the debug package for the cwidget library.