Re: A Question About Aptitude
On Sat, Nov 04, 2006 at 02:06:19AM -0600, Russell L. Harris wrote:
> 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.
OK. You have a point. (Although I have reservation on "much better".)
Just for the record ...
> 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,
aptitude has similar. I understand apt-get/apt-cache is not so easy.
> 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.
I think synaptics is the first tool which supported debtags mechanism
which is good thing. Hmmm... I do not see debtags support under
synaptics although documentation mention it. Synaptics in sid does
not support debtags now.
Synaptic has nice and easy gui search helper tool.
aptitude has extensive search function too which can read package
description and make quite complicated search rules. But this is based
on regular expression concept which is not so easy for novice. Now, ~G
will match debtags. This is not so intuitive ... wait, the current
aptitude in sid seems to support many browsing mode including debtags.
Nice.
> For example, searching on description as well as name often turns up
> useful packages of which the user was not aware.
Yes.
> A simple click on the
> package name displays in the lower pane of the screen a description of
> the package.
Use of ~d etc. will let me do this in aptitude but it is not so
intuitive.
> Contrary to the opinion of some, the graphical user interface is not
> inherently evil.
That is true as long as you have working X :-)
> 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.
This is good point. I may use this search thing in synaptic in future.
Thanks reminding me. Since packagesearch tool is based KDE/Qt, now I
should use this as search tool under gnome.
Again, people need to use best tools for their tasks.
Osamu
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