On 04/09/2013 11:57 AM, Osamu Aoki wrote:
Hi, On Tue, Apr 09, 2013 at 09:32:52AM +0800, Chow Loong Jin wrote:On 09/04/2013 06:43, Adam Borowski wrote:
Have you been able to get that effect from aptitude? It seems that whenever it sees some trouble (sometimes even when plain apt-get would succeed), it proposes to remove the world, install a few unrelated packages, and not do whatever you requested it to. After declining a varying number of such "solutions", it gives up even if it would take a single action to resolve the problem.Yeah, I have actually. It's just that the recent multiarch issues (which still haven't been fixed) tend to lead to aptitude attempting to remove the whole (foreign-arch) world. If none of the other decisions make sense, you're actually able to prod aptitude in the right direction by supplying some extra operations interactively at the [Y|n|q] prompt.I'm not sure if it makes sense to recommend aptitude in its present state.I wouldn't recommend it when operating with multiarch enabled. Otherwise it's mostly fine.Yes but it is not that bad. I was also shocked to see: * denial of downgrade request as the first suggestion * massive package removal as the second suggestion
I've seen behaviors approximating this from aptitude even without multiarch - indeed, from years before multiarch was even proposed AFAIK. It's precisely that sort of thing that leads me to use apt-get over aptitude almost exclusively. When going through a dozen or more - or several dozen - suggested resolutions which don't even come close to achieving what I requested on the command line (and often seem to be getting progressively further away from it, at that) is more the rule than the exception for aptitude, but apt-get seems to consistently find a suitable resolution on the first try, it seems to me that something is wrong with the aptitude resolver. apt-get's dependency resolver may be less "smart" than that of aptitude, but it also seems to fail less stupidly. Since last I heard mixing and matching between the two is not encouraged (though I don't know why not), and since dealing with the limitations of apt-get is far less aggravating for me than dealing with the attempted cleverness of aptitude, I find the older program by far the more preferable solution. -- The Wanderer Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any side of it. Every time you let somebody set a limit they start moving it. - LiveJournal user antonia_tiger