Miles Bader wrote:
Chris Lale <chrislale@untrammelled.co.uk> writes:Would you mind telling me why you think this is misinformation? (I had in mind that using Apt-get for a while and then using Aptitude could result in Aptitude wanting to remove packages that you wanted to keep.)AFAIK, modulo bugs, that isn't the case. The problem with mixing apt-get and aptitude is that aptitude might automatically remove _fewer_ packages than you'd like. -Miles
I think that Aptitude might sometimes want to remove _more_ packages than you would like. In an earlier thread, Florian Kulzer tried an experiment in which Aptitude wanted to remove gdm after a Gnome install - not what you would want to happen. He wrote (http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2006/12/msg00288.html):
I wanted to check if the above trick scales up to more complicated cases, so I ran "apt-get install gnome". This installed 88 packages on my system and removed abiword (due to a conflict with the automatically installed abiword-gnome). Afterwards I saw that "aptitude install -f" wanted to remove gdm and three packages that depended on it. Aborting the operation and running "aptitude keep-all" fixed this and made thesystem stable again.
He also concluded that:
It looks like mixing aptitude and apt-get is not dangerous, but it takes away one of the main advantages of aptitude over apt-get. ([...] automatic removal of unused packages [...])
-- Chris.