John Halton wrote:
Marty wrote:Did it acquire a GUI? My Sarge version only seems to have a curses interface.I'm guessing that the reference to a "GUI" was to aptitude's "interactive" mode, which is indeed a curses interface.They are (or at least should be) complementary, not competing tools.As I understand it, it's not a good idea to mix-and-match between apt-get and aptitude. I believe aptitude works best when it is the only package manager in town.According to Martin Krafft's site, aptitude is now to be preferred over apt-get, certainly for dist-upgrades. See http://debiansystem.info/readers/changes/181-aptitude-upgrades
I'm sure there are good reasons for aptitude's preference for sole control of package management, but none are compelling to me personally. The dist-upgrade/resolver issue seems compelling, but I managed fine without it on my latest round of upgrades and hopefully won't be facing it again for a few years.
As I alluded before, the resolver should (ideally) be decoupled from the interface so that a variety of package managers can be used equally. I assume or hope that's the plan, and that the current emphasis on aptitude is just a temporary anomaly. Otherwise the other package managers would have to be phased out or permanently relegated to second-class status.