Re: Strange "smart" upgrades in aptitude / synaptic?
On Sun, 31 Jul 2005 23:58:12 +0200
Christian Pernegger <pernegger@gmail.com> wrote:
> When it recently suggested I
> should remove most of gnome just to bump the debian revision of one
> package I went looking for alternatives. There seem to be two types of
> apt frontends:
Can't speak for the others, but in Synaptic....
>
> old school: apt-get, dselect, synaptic (Default Upgrade). Those won't
> uninstall a working package unless you tell it to.
This is equivalent of doing 'apt-get upgrade'.
> "smart": aptitude, synaptic (Smart Upgrade) Those will remove a third
> of your installed packages in one go if you're not careful.
This is equivalent of doing 'apt-get dist-upgrade'
> Now I'm sure there's a reason for the new behaviour. Could someone
> please explain to me why the new-style tool behave like they do?
In the case of Synaptic this is not 'new behaviour' it is just giving
you the equivalent of things you could do at the command line by
giving you things you can click on in a GUI interface instead of
having to remember the commands and/or type the commands in at the
command prompt.
Personally I like Synaptic. If you have sources for multiple
distrobutions or versions of a distrobution in your sources.list you
can choose which is the default. You can force upgrades/downgrades
depending on your situation. It's easy to cancel and choose a different
course of action if selecting something displays additional changes you
don't want. You can easily pin packages. Easily enable disable
different repositories if one is slow or seems to be temporarily
unavalaible.
I still prefer the command line in some cases where things got broke
during an upgrade and I still prefer dselect when getting rid of left
over configrations from uninstalled packages or getting rid of obsolete
packages, but for most stuff I use Synaptic.
Which ever front end you use you kind of have to learn the ins and outs
of the methods it provides for dealing with various conditions, what
people see as an advantage or disadvantage differs depending on what
they want out of a front end.
Later, Seeker
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