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Re: Maze of Twisty Turny Little Package Managers

Arlie Stephens wrote:
Hi Folks, 
It appears that there are a lot of tools for managing packages and
dependencies on debian - dpkg, apt-get, aptitude, synaptic, ????. To what extent do these tools understand the same data, i.e. to what extent can one mix and match between them? 
I notice some confusion (someone else's question) about which are the
'official' or favored method in debian - but my confusion is even more
fundamental. To what extent is it safe to follow people's
recomendations, when one person habitually uses apt-get, another
mentions aptitude, etc. etc.? 

Hi Arlie,
Most of the answers you are getting don't seem to address your real question, so keep in mind that I don't use aptitude, but I'll try to answer.
You should be able to safely use any combination of apt-cache, apt-get, synaptic, update-notifier, update-manager, deborphan, gtkorphan, and probably gdebi.
Mixing aptitude with apt-get, synaptic, or gdebi may cause weirdness. It won't kill you, if you're careful. Aptitude should work fine (I think) mixed with the other programs mentioned. 

As to your other question below, I don't have a clue.  :)

Regards,
Matthew


Related to this, I've a problem specific to a combination of aptitude
and my employer's internal servers. (We've got mirrors of several
linux distros, with company "value add", which I'm expected to use
rather than the official distributions.) The people maintaining these
sites don't seem to use aptitude at all, and I think they've broken
something, because aptitude always tells me that most upgradeable
packages are "held" at some current, lower version. (They claim
not to have done this on purpose, which was my first guess, since I
can imagine them wanting to test and officially 'bless' new versions.) Any idea what they could have done, and how I could work around it? 
(I don't think it's debian itself, because my home system - which uses
the official sites - doesn't have any such problem.)
Perhaps what I really need is some kind of FAQ for coping with the large number of package management options and their confusing 
interrelationships. Does any such thing exist?
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