the Debian way to sync apt-get and aptitude

[David Kirchner <dpk@dpk.net>]

Is there a Debian way to sync apt-get and aptitude data files? We just
had a problem where aptitude decided to programs that were installed
by apt-get immediately prior. This is on Sarge stable.

Specifically, the steps to reproduce this were:

apt-get install flac
aptitude
  Press 'g' and you'd see 2 held back packages (cpio, libssl) and 4
packages to be removed (flac and its dependencies).

If you removed flac+deps with aptitude and then reinstalled them with
apt-get, aptitude would still want to remove flac.

This could not be reproduced on another Sarge stable server, so I
suspect the aptitude/apt-get data files got corrupted in some way.

Upgrading 'cpio' and 'libssl' packages took care of this particular
problem, but that doesn't make a lot of sense, since they're not
dependencies or conflicts to flac.

(I have searched Google for this, but I find a lot of documentation
for aptitude instead. I'm fine with being pointed at documentation if
someone written about this somewhere.)