Re: Why does aptitude do this?
> The following packages are unused and will be REMOVED:
> amor eyesapplet fifteenapplet kdetoys kmoon kodo kteatime ktux kweather
> kworldclock xmms
[...]
IMHO aptitude suffers from two grave design bugs:
1) it's resolver uses a dist-upgrade strategy,
thus [U] (upgrade all) will happily mark a boatload of packages for
removal if that means it can upgrade a single package more. This
situation occurs frequently on testing and unstable, during all kinds
of transitions or updates of larger package sets (X, gnome, kde, ...)
Yes, one can and should always check what it's doing, but finding the
offending package (to hold it until it can be cleanly upgraded) can be
a pain. Ideally it should only upgrade packages and (maybe) install
new ones if there are new dependencies, never remove an installed
package without further user intervention. (apt-get, dselect and
synaptic work like that.)
2a) its great feature for marking explicitly and automatically
installed packages doesn't play nice with other managers.
It should never mark stuff installed by other tools as 'auto'. Either
assume them all to be manual, or present a dialog at startup, along
the lines of: "These packages have been installed in my absence,
please review the provided list and mark 'manual' as needed."
2b) The auto/manual functionality and the new resolver should be in a
backend so all package managers can use it.
Maybe the resolver could go into apt-get and dpkg get a new
"--mark-auto" switch. All package state should definitely go in one
location, too. As it is, aptitude does its own thing in
/var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates.
The new tag support is great, don't know if that's an aptitude-ism or
if all package managers will / can be updated to take advantage. (I
miss the default dselect view sorted by package importance, though.)
> Consequently, I am now staying away from that GUI and am running it from the CL.
IIRC I bug reported some of this a while ago, but the maintainer found
nothing wrong with it so who am I to complain. As long as apt-get /
dselect stay I'm happy :) Going through cruft with deborphan /
debfoster is less work for me than dealing with aptitude.
I just wish it weren't pushed as the default package manager in new installs.
C.
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