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Re: apt-* vs aptitude vs synaptic



Lennart Sorensen wrote:
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.
And if I only change that by doing "aptitude update" then no database building should
be necessary at "aptitude install" time.  But it happens everytime. :-/

Helge Hafting



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