[rbanffy]

> Unless they intended their users to open terminals

They could run it on a separate process and deal with stdin/stdout within a GUI program. No problem that way either.

[rdtsc]

Even better they could have assigned some devs to create dpkg and apt options to output stdout data in a structured format (xml for ex) to facilitate this kind of interaction. Bazaar has that for example.

The downside is that that could significantly slow down the application, depending on the types of queries and commands that are performed.