Re: A case study of a new user turned off debian
On Tue, Nov 04, 2003 at 01:11:43AM -0500, Joey Hess wrote:
> Suggested project: Create a package that, a-l-apt-move, pulls packages
> out of the apt cache and creates apt repositories from them. But make it
> create a new repository after every upgrade, by hooking into apt. And
> auto-add these repositories to sources.list, and remove old ones after a
> while, the whole nine yards.
This was more or less how I thought this should look, if it were worth
implementing. But it should work just as well with a single repository,
pruned from time to time. All that'd be required would be a tool to move
packages out of apt's cache and run apt-ftparchive on them.
> Eight reasons why you should be using aptitude instead of apt-get.
>
> 1. aptitude can look just like apt-get
>
> If you run 'aptitude update' or 'aptitude upgrade' or 'aptitude
> install', it looks and works just like apt-get, with a few enhancements.
> So there is no learning curve.
For the most common operations, there is no learning curve (and there is a
lot more power, e.g. the Y/n/? prompt). However, aptitude doesn't quite
supersede apt-get yet, and there are two significant reasons why I'm not
quite yet able to tell users "use aptitude" as an unconditional replacement
for apt-get (which I otherwise would like to do).
1. Source package handling is not (yet?) implemented
2. aptitude in woody has some significant bugs (for example, it can't
install imp), so stable users could run into some unexpected problems
> 6. aptitude makes it easy to keep track of obsolete software
>
> If Debian stops distributing a package, apt will leave it on your system
> indefinitly, with no warnings, and no upgrades. Aptitude lists such
> packages in its "Obsolete and Locally Created Packages" section, so you
> can be informed of the problem and do something about it.
This method of dealing with obsolete packages (dselect also does this,
right?) is much better than doing nothing, but still leaves something to be
desired. The difference between a locally created package and an obselete
package from Debian is great, but they look the same in such a display.
--
- mdz
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