Re: apt-* vs aptitude vs synaptic
On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 04:21:05PM +0200, Hans-J. Ullrich wrote:
> Dear maintainers,
>
> it seems for me, that the commandline tool "apt", the ncurses tool "aptitude"
> and the graphical tool "synaptic" might use different databases.
>
> So I need a little more background (and knowledge) about this, otherwise I
> cannot explain myself, why "apt-get dist-upgrade" is giving another result
> as "aptitude" (in my case "apt-get dist-upgrade" wants to deinstall some
> openoffice.org-packages, beryl* and some other, but "aptitude" will not want
> to deinstall those).
>
> Are they using all different databases ? Or is it just related to some
> configuration ?
>
> I looked into the manuals, but found no explanation...
They all use dpkg's database of installed packages, and the same list of
available packages. They do however differ in how they resolve
dependancy comflicts. Aptitude tries much mroe complex solutions to try
and avoid uninstalling something than apt-get. Not sure what synaptic
does since I never use it.
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.
--
Len Sorensen
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