On Sun, Jan 26, 2003 at 05:54:03PM +0000, Hugh Saunders wrote: > On Sun, Jan 26, 2003 at 01:46:41PM +1100, Rob Weir wrote: > > # aptitude install bleh > > Yeah, i figured that but then i thought why not apt-get!! Aptitude is smarter in same ways, for a start, but the bigger reason is that aptitude keeps track of which packages were explicitly installed, and which were installed to satisfy dependencies... Say I want to try out KDE (kde2 for this example, since it's in sid). Hmm, it seems to be uninstallable at the moment anyhow :/...I'll just make up this example then. kde is just a meta-package; it depends on a pile of programs and a bazillion libraries. If I 'apt-get install kde', try it out, then decide I prefer twm after all, my natural reaction would be to 'apt-get --purge remove kde' to get rid of it... Oh, wait! That only removes the KDE package, which is ~1KB, not KDE which is several orders of magnitude greater! aptitude, on the other hand, would have noticed that the piles of programs and bazillion libraries were only installed because the 'kde' package depended on them, and will happily remove them (if you let it, this feature is, of course, configurable) for you, getting you back to the state you were before you tried kde. And that's the story of why I use aptitude instead of apt-get 90% of the time :-) > Would still be good to be able to sync the aptitude package status with > the actual package status, is this possible? Doesn't it? Or do you mean package holds and such? -rob
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