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Re: apt-* vs aptitude vs synaptic



On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 10:40:29AM +0200, Helge Hafting wrote:
> 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".

Well yes, aptitude is a huge pig of an object oriented C++ program.

> 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.

I do tend to use apt-get myself just because I am used to typing that
and rather impatient.

> 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.

They are cached, but also have to be updated whenever the available
packages lists change.  Well at least some stuff is cached.

-- 
Len Sorensen


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