Re: aptitude vs. apt-get
On Thu, Feb 03, 2005 at 02:03:20PM -0600, Rob Brenart (TT) wrote:
> aptitude vs. apt-get
>
> I've read a couple commentaries, specifically a note on debian.org
> (http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/reference/ch-woody.en.html)
> suggesting usage of aptitude over apt-get.
>
> But I've been using apt-get & dselect in combination for some time now,
> will switching to aptitude cause me problems? Will using aptitude and
> apt-get interchangeably cause me problems?
>
> Or are they really just different interfaces to the same system and I'll
> be ok?
Ok, I see someone has to stand up for apt-get here, everybody else seems
to go for aptitude...
Having used aptitude only shortly after a long time of dselect (as
that's what was thrown at you upon fresh install and maybe still is),
I am not _too_ knowledeable with aptitude. However, I can say that I
love to have my command line for system stuff. Now aptitude still
qualifies with its ncurses(?) interface as I can run it without X.
But in the spirit of simple building blocks used to create more
complicated actions a
deborphan | xargs apt-get -y remove
just hides less information from me than the option to do exactly the
same in aptitude. Or take
apt-get install -o Acquire::cdrom::mount=/dvdrw somepackage
to install somepackage from dvd. On other occasions I have used
apt-get -qq --print-uris dist-upgrade | awk '{print $1}' > packages.get
to get the packages for an update of an offline system, together with
'wget -x -i packages.get' on an online system.
The point is that there is a lot of flexibility in apt-get. Together
with 'apt-cache search' and 'apt-cache show' it is all I need to
administrate my packages. And that's not denying that aptitude might
be a very comfortable tool.
Andreas
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