Paul Johnson <baloo@ursine.dyndns.org> writes: > On Sat, Feb 15, 2003 at 02:29:39PM -0800, Brian Nelson wrote: >> I think you'd be much better off forgoing apt-get and using an >> interactive package tool instead such as aptitude. Proper use of such a >> tool will make it much easier to keep your package system in stable >> state. > > Why does everybody keep saying this when it's false? Well, it's really just an opinion, so you can't really say it's false... > Aptitude and apt-get are getting thier information from the same place > and making the same decisions. Err, I haven't examined the source of either, but AIUI each package tool (apt-get, dselect, aptitude, etc.) has its own algorithm for resolving conflicts. > Both tell you quite specifically what is going on before it asks you > to commit to it. I disagree. apt-get is rather shy when it comes to providing the rationale behind its decisions, which results in fairly frequent questions of the nature, "why is apt-get holding back some packages?" > Nobody has yet demonstrated on the list anything that you can do in > aptitude easier or faster than you can with some combination of > apt-file, apt-cache and apt-get. What if you want to honor a package's "Recommends" field with apt-get? That'll take some extra effort that isn't necessary with aptitude. Or what if you want to automatically remove the dependencies a package pulled in when you delete that package? Pretty tricky to do with apt-get. Also, apt-get cannot provide user interaction to resolve a tricky conflict and instead will just give up, leaving the user confused as to what went wrong. Aptitude can do some pretty neat tricks too. For example, you can duplicate the functionality of deborphan (without having to periodically re-run it a la deborphan) by simply running aptitude, opening "Installed Packages", moving the cursor down to "libs", and typing 'M' as in shift-m. I don't buy the claims that aptitude is more intuitive or user-friendly than dselect, but it's certainly a powerful tool in its own right. > "But aptitude's a front end to apt!" No, apt is a front end to dpkg, > and aptitude is a replacement to dselect when using apt as a source. Technically, both apt-get and aptitude are front-ends to APT. BTW, apt-get was originally written as a prototype to test the APT (aka Deity) system back when it was new. It was never really intended to be a full-blown package management tool. I believe this is the first announcement of it: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1998/debian-devel-199803/msg00796.html -- On a scale of 1 to 10? It sucked.
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