Re: A Question About Aptitude
The point which I was trying to make -- which point has been lost in
this thread -- is that, particularly for those who are new to Debian and
for those who are not "power users", it almost always is much better to
use Synaptic than to use Aptitude or to regress to apt-get, etc.
Considering the typical abundance of drive space, it today is of little
consequence whether uninstallation of a package also automatically
results in unistallation of dependent packages.
But what is important are features of Synaptic such as the package
category panel, which can facilitate finding a package suitable for a
particular application and the search function, which has a variety of
options, rather than being limited to the package name.
For example, searching on description as well as name often turns up
useful packages of which the user was not aware. A simple click on the
package name displays in the lower pane of the screen a description of
the package.
Contrary to the opinion of some, the graphical user interface is not
inherently evil. In this type of application, the graphical user
interface of Synaptic is very well suited to rapid searching and
scanning of a large number of candidates, and helps acquaint the user
with the resources available in the Debian package archive.
RLH
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