Apt-get and aptitude man pages (was "aptitude synaptic gnome to be removed?")

[rvclayton@acm.org (R. Clayton)]

  I feel like answering RTFM again, but you've been reasonable and polite. 
  Thank you for your courtesy.

  'apt-get upgrade' is restricted (and therefore safer) in that:

     under no circumstances are currently installed packages removed,

Neither the apt-get nor the aptitude man page make that distinction (which is
not to say it's wrong, just that you can't learn it by RingTFM).  The apt-get
man page distinguishes upgrade from dist-upgrade only by noting that
dist-upgrade is smarter than upgrade about resolving conflicts. It may be that
dist-upgrade smartly resolves conflicts by removing currently installed
packages, but the man page doesn't explicitly indicate that.

The aptitude man page doesn't, except for the synopsis, mention dist-upgrade at
all.

As an aside, the apt-get and aptitude man pages describe different behaviors
for upgrade.  For apt-get, upgrade has the non-removal behavior described
above.  For aptitude, the upgrade behavior is "Installed packages will not be
removed unless they are unused".

This is on a debian testing system, upgraded once a week.