Re: aptitude has Priority: standard, why?
On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 10:18:50AM -0300, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 31, 2015, at 05:14, Fabian Greffrath wrote:
> > I am curious why the aptitude package still has Priority: standard, i.e.
> > why it is installed next to apt in each and every Debian installation?
> >
> > Aptitude isn't recommended for dist-upgrading since Lenny, I think.
> >
> > Do we really need to have two CLI package management tools installed, is
> > this reasonable?
>
> Well, aptitude IS the CLI package manager. As far as I know, it is also the
> most complete and advanced package manager Debian has. Make no mistake:
> aptitude is the Debian package manager you should be using if you can deal
> with text mode and the command line.
No, it is not. It used to be, but apt's dependency resolver is far
superior to aptitude's these days.
I stopped using aptitude when I got tired of having to tell it to try
some other solution *each*and*every*time* I tried doing an upgrade.
When you tell aptitude to "install package A", its dependency resolver
will sometimes happily tell you that in order to do what you asked it to
do, it must install package A's dependencies, but leave package A itself
uninstalled.
When you tell aptitude to "upgrade package A", its dependency resolver
will sometimes happily tell you that in order to do what you asked it to
do, it must *remove* package A rather than upgrade it.
Ther are plenty of such bugs in aptitude's dependency resolver. I
recommend against using it, these days.
And no, we shouldn't have it installed by default anymore.
--
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-- Barack Obama, speaking in Brussels, Belgium, 2014-03-26
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