Re: Re: Where are we now? (Was: Bits from the RM)
Hi,
aptitude has a lot of problems that I don't have enough time to fix,
but I would appreciate it if people would confine themselves to the
facts when criticizing it.
On Thu, Oct 02, 2003 at 04:10:21PM -0500, Chris Cheney <ccheney@cheney.cx> was heard to say:
> On Thu, Oct 02, 2003 at 08:31:08PM +0200, Robert Lemmen wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 02, 2003 at 01:14:25PM -0400, Nathanael Nerode wrote:
> > > Please don't do this yet, since dselect is still more self-documenting,
> > > and therefore easier for new people to use. :-P
> >
> > please do! dselect (whil ebeing verty simple and functional) has the
> > most counter-intuitive user interface i have seen. the day i discovered
> > aptitude and got rid of dselect meant a big step forward for my persoanl
> > debian experience.
>
> From what I have heard about aptitude it has the fun side effect of
> removing packages that it thinks you didn't purposely install.
It only "thinks" you didn't purposely install something if it was
pulled in purely through dependencies, and you can manually reset its
notion of whether something was automatically installed at any time.
It also explicitly lists packages being removed for this reason, and
you can turn this behavior off if you want.
> Also
> aptitude's sort function was more user unfriendly than dselect by far
> (just hit 'o'). I happen to use the sort option in dselect often. If
> aptitude can be used as dselect is now, eg hit 'g' to download just
> standard it will be ok I suppose.
That's true.
> I also don't think it is a particularly good idea for aptitude to
> default to installing suggests since it will likely bloat systems quite
> a bit installing various things such as bash-doc, gpart, parted, etc.
aptitude doesn't depend on any of those. Do you mean when installing
other packages? If too much stuff is being pulled in from Recommends,
the package maintainers are using Recommends incorrectly. I haven't
found this to be a problem in practice.
> Also, it will automatically install packages in non-free (when user has
> non-free listed) since packages in main are allowed to suggest non-free.
aptitude installs Recommendations by default because this is what
Recommandations mean. It does not install Suggestions because
Suggestions are not meant to be installed by default. If you are
installing packages from contrib (which can Recommend and even Depend on
stuff in non-free), you should expect to get non-free stuff on your system.
Daniel
--
/-------------------- Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> -------------------\
| Put no trust in cryptic comments. |
\---- Be like the kid in the movie! Play chess! -- http://www.uschess.org ---/
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