Re: apt-* vs aptitude vs synaptic
Lennart Sorensen wrote:
I believe the officially recommended tool in Debian is aptitude as of
the Etch release. It simply does dependancy resolution better than the
other tools. I personally tend to mostly use apt-get still, mostly out
of habit. Of course any apt-get command can be issued with aptitude the
same way, except you get the more advanced dependancy resolution.
aptitude will offer possible solutions to conflicts and let you pick an
option, while apt-get simply makes a decision and asks if you want to
proceed.
Aptitude may be better - it sure does the job. But it spends a lot of time
at every invocation on "building dependency trees" and "tag databases".
It is therefore noticeably slower than apt-get to use for simple tasks
like installing a single uncontroversial package. Whenever I upgrade a
single
package, I get a list of all the not-upgraded packages - I didn't ask
for that.
and when it needs to remove something (despite the better resolution)
I have to confirm several times instead of just once with apt-get.
So, better in some ways, but also much clunkier. If it needs a
dependency tree and a tag database almost all the time,
why not keep the information around in a cache? Perhaps an
"apt-get" or manual "dpkg" might invalidate the cache, but
the information should at least stay current as long as I use
aptitude exclusively. That'd make aptitude much more pleasant.
Helge Hafting
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