Re: mixing aptitude and synaptic

[Chris Lale <chrislale@untrammelled.co.uk>]

Black Dew wrote:

> kamaraju kusumanchi wrote:
>
> > Is it OK to mix aptitude and synaptic? I know that it is not good to 
> > mix apt-get and aptitude. But what about using synaptic sometimes and 
> > aptitude sometimes? any suggestions?
> >
> > Please CC me on the replies as I am not subscribe to d-u.
>
>
> Both synaptic and aptitude are just front ends to apt, it shouldn't be 
> a problem to use any combination of them
I don't think that this is true. Aptitude is not a front end for 
apt-get. That said, I use both interchangeably with no problems.

There is one snag. Aptitude keeps a note of packages that have been 
installed manually (as opposed to being installed automatically as 
dependencies). The result is that it assumes that any packages installed 
using Synaptic were not manually installed. This means that Aptitude 
sometimes wants to remove a number of your packages because it assumes 
that they are no longer needed. The solution (thanks to Magnus Therning 
in a previous post) is to run

   # aptitude unmarkauto --schedule-only '~i'

before running Aptitude commands.

Hth,
Chris.