Re: apt-get deprecated?

[Paul E Condon <pecondon@mesanetworks.net>]

On Sun, May 01, 2005 at 06:21:32PM +0530, Ritesh Raj Sarraf wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> mm wrote:
> 
> > Is there any compelling reason to use `apt-get' over `aptitude', given
> > the latter's more robust feature set (installation tracking, for
> > example)?
> >
> 
> The compelling reason could be that I just like apt-get and I don't see
> anything not achievable in it that I should switch to something else.
>  
> > I've been using aptitude exclusively for about a year for installing
> > packages, yet still see a lot of new documentation with directives to
> > install/upgrade with apt-get.
> 

Aptitude and apt-get behave differently when _removing_ packages.
Aptitude keeps track of which packages were install because the user
directly requested that they be installed and which were installed in
order to satisfy a dependency. Then when the user request that a
package be removed, it checks its database of packages that were
installed to satisfy a dependency and also removes those 'dependancy
satisfying' packages that can be removed because no other package
needs them.

In most cases this is good, but it can lead to aptitude doing really
bad things in some special situations. For instance, I once installed
kde by requesting the single over-all package that exists only to
bring in all the packages needed to give the user a standard kde
set-up.  Then, after using it for a while, I decided that a lot of
what was there was stuff and clutter that I didn't want. I tried to
remove the stuff that I didn't want, but aptitude wouldn't do it,
because it insisted that I had to remove the over-all kde package
first. But when I removed that, it threatened to remove _all_ kde
packages, which is not what I wanted.  I used apt-get to remove the
package kde. This made all of kde's component packages into
independent packages in the little mind of aptitude. Then I removed
the ones that I didn't want without aptitude trashing the rest of my
kde set-up.

So, both are needed, at least until users like me understand aptitude
internals better.

-- 
Paul E Condon           
pecondon@mesanetworks.net