Re: aptitude has Priority: standard, why?
On Wed, Apr 1, 2015, at 16:43, The Wanderer wrote:
> On 04/01/2015 at 12:02 PM, Peter Samuelson wrote:
> > That sounds like you believe aptitude has only a command-line
> > interface.
>
> I was indeed only aware of its command-line interface, until just
> yesterday; comments in this thread mentioning a "curses interface" led
> me to experiment, and discover how to invoke that.
Yeah, well, the interactive windowed-text-mode ("curses") interface is why I consider aptitude the Debian package manager, although you can probably get access to all of its functionality from the command line. There was also a GTK-based GUI mode, but I never tried it and I don't know if it still exists.
I should have written "interactive text mode" instead of "CLI" in my first reply to this thread. When I looked at the resulting thread a few hours later, there wasn't any real reason to reply as others had already made all good for-and-against points for aptitude ;-)
The subtle window interface of aptitude's interactive mode might cause a lot of confusion at first, so first-time users really should read the aptitude manual.
Since I nearly always use the interactive mode, I never really bothered much with the quirks of the aptitude dependency solver: after what feels like more than a decade of using it, I don't even notice anymore that I skipped to the second or third suggestion before hitting "G" (go). That would explain my blind side to its idiotic "first solution" choices, to the point I didn't even bother to try to configure it to be less bloodthirsty.
The truth is that way too many of us got introduced to aptitude _a very long time ago_ when it first became a viable alternative to dselect. It is simply impossible to describe the kind of permanent impression aptitude made when it delivered us (old-timer DDs and Debian users) from dselect. We don't even consider people might not know about it or how to use it :-( so it really ought to get some new blood to enhance the docs, add first-time-user landing pages, etc.
aptitude needs some love to update its defaults at the very least, that's for sure.
> If I recall correctly, my original question was about a replacement for
> 'apt-cache policy', which is about the single most common thing I use
> apt-cache for - with show and search being probably second and third
> place, respectively. I have been unable to identify any aptitude analog
> for that functionality.
aptitude lets you search on it (?archive(<archive>), such as unstable/stable/wheezy/proposed-updates...), and you can configure it to show a column with the archive of a package, not just its version. And it will list all available versions of a package and which archive they come from if you select a package from the list.
In this era of wider displays (even text-mode), it would make a lot of sense to change its default display filter to include the archive by default.
FWIW, here's the display format I use in aptitude (changeable through the Options|Preferences menu, item "The display format for pacakge views"):
%c%a%M%S %p %Z %20v %20V %10t
Try that, tune the two "20" and the "10" to something that fits well the width of your text terminal.
--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@debian.org>
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