Re: apt-get upgrade advice

[Graeme Tank <graemet@umich.edu>]

On Sat, Jun 14, 2003 at 12:59:55AM -0700, Paul Johnson wrote:
> 
> Have you tried aptitude?  It's like dselect but with a bit more brain.

I recall using aptitude briefly as a Debian novice on stable, but found
apt-cache (search|show) and apt-get install easier for upgrades within
stable. I can easily imagine others preferring aptitude.

Later (just recently), I wanted to make the move to testing and found
Colin Watson's May 9 post:

	I much prefer upgrading with dselect. I've spent too much time fixing
	very subtle problems with 'apt-get dist-upgrade' that really
	shouldn't have gone wrong (debconf and xbase-clients upgrade problems
	come to mind) that I don't trust it.

I repeat it here, because the upgrade from stable to testing with
dselect went smoothly ... kudos to those responsible.

After the move to a testing/unstable system, I found dselect easy to use
to hold and unhold packages. In this way aptitude would work well, too.
Thanks Paul, I'll check it out. (However, because aptitude is a
front-end for apt, perhaps it's best to use dselect for dist-upgrades as
Colin recommends.)

Lastly, Paul, you mention aptitude has a bit more brain. How so? Does it
do a better job resolving dependencies than dselect? Is the usability
better? For me, usability in dselect is, well, not as usable as it could
be. To pick one example, if the package information spills over to more
than one page, you press 'd' (delete in many other apps) to scroll down
instead of 'space' (which scrolls down the package listing in the upper
window instead of the information in the lower window). Yes, one can
understand why 'space' does this, but still, the usability isn't there.

Graeme