Re: subtle difference between package managers

[Marty <martyb@ix.netcom.com>]

Hendrik Boom wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 14, 2005 at 10:47:54PM -0500, Aaron Hall wrote:
> > On Thu, 14 Jul 2005, Ibrahim Mubarak wrote:
> >
> > >with all three of them at the same time (apt, aptitude, and synaptic).
> > >That's what I am doing now. I started off with apt-get, then I got to
> > >know aptitude, which adds a few nice tricks, and finally went with
> > >synaptic because I tried it and like it. I sometimes switch between the
> > >three depending on what I want to do and how I want to do it. Never had
> > >my box break !
> >
> > Switching between apt-get and aptitude makes it easier to get yourself
> > into trouble if you don't really understand what the programs are doing
> > and what their (subtle) differences are.
>
> Now I know that there are subtle difference, and that I should understand
> them.  Are they more than that aptitude remembers which packages were
> explicitly requested?  Are they documented somewhere?

It's not really a case of subtle differences between equivalent tools.  That
seems to be a common (and, I think hazardous) misunderstanding.

Aptitude is an apt front-end, which makes it a functional (proper) superset
of apt because it calls apt commands, while apt itself could be thought of
as a functional superset of dpkg because it calls dpkg, which does all the
dirty work.

Aptitude is in the highest level of the package installation tool chain,
and to compare "apples to apples" you would have to compare it to dselect,
synaptic, stormpkg, deity, gnome-apt, kpackage, etc.

So to understand the tools properly is to see them as a hierarchy of
packaging tools.  As for docs I think the apt howto is your best starting point.

> -- hendrik