Re: aptitude vs synaptic
Bob Alexander wrote:
> So I am asking: are there behavioural differences between aptitude and
> synaptic ?
Personally, I don't like aptitude. For systems lacking X I prefer dselect
(seems to me it gives more info about what it's going to do). Synaptic is a
very good tool if you have X. In particular, I find its "search in name and
description" feature very useful (maybe also aptitude has that feature and
I've never managed to find where).
One thing dselect has and others do not have (or, again, I've not found
where), is the listing of "suggested" packages. It's not clear to me if the
packages automatically selected as dependencies by aptitude and synaptic
are only the strict dependencies, or include the "recommended" ones, or
include also the "suggested" ones. This makes a difference when you are
installing packages like "kdevelop", where the multithreaded QT libraries
are not strict dependencies but without them you can't build a KDE app.
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