[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: How to Totally!! nuke X11?



Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net> writes:
>> Maybe you don't care, and have gobs of disk space to burn, but _lots
>> of people do care_, and aptitude does an elegant and painless job of
>> satisfying this desire (unlike deborphan; I used it for a long time
>> before aptitude was usable, and frankly, deborphan is an unreliable
>> and cranky hack).
>
> Really?  I've never had problems with deborphan.  GtkOrphan is
> really handy.

Yes.

The problem with deborphan is that because it's run as a sort of
after-the-fact cleanup task, it's lacking a rather crucial piece of
information that aptitude has:  which packages did the user specifically
_ask_ to be installed.  Without that info, you can't do a good job.

When I used deborphan I had evolved a system of scripts which tried to
maintain this information, but it was forever getting out of sync, and
felt like a kludge.

Switching to aptitude swept all that crap away; suddenly everything just
_worked_.

[The "intelligently resolve broken packages" functionality (in recent
versions of aptitude) might take a while to get tuned to the point where
it feels quite so painless, but I think ultimately it's a useful
facility, especially for non-expert users.]

-Miles

-- 
"1971 pickup truck; will trade for guns"



Reply to: