Re: Source of Debian wisdom

[Ken Irving <fnkci@uaf.edu>]

On Sun, Aug 19, 2007 at 03:31:19PM -0500, Mumia W.. wrote:
> On 08/19/2007 02:25 PM, Manon Metten wrote:
>> Hi Douglas,
>> On 8/19/07, Douglas A. Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca> wrote:
>> Note that many of the horror stories about aptitude involved
>>> people using it as a CLI replacement for apt-get instead of using its
>>> curses interface.
>> Are you saying I should NOT use aptitude as a replacement for
>> apt-get, like this: "aptitude install new-package" ?
>> I've been using aptitude like this all the time ever since I installed 
>> etch
>> with no problems whatsoever.
>> What's the problem of doing so and not using it's user interface?
>> Manon.
>
> I almost exclusively use aptitude under Sarge. Both the curses and command 
> line interfaces work perfectly, and I've never had or heard of a horror 
> story involving aptitude*.
>
> And aptitude is clearly the most advanced interface to the packaging 
> system.
>
> I only use apt-get when I need to install from the source (which aptitude 
> cannot do).

I wonder why that is; the source packages are independent of binary ones.

> I'm also curious about what problems other people are having with aptitude.

I haven't tried aptitude for some time, and apparently the problem I
had with it (where it wanted to remove a lot of stuff) has been fixed.
I think that, even before that fix, it would work reasonably (i.e., no
surprises)  as long as it was used exclusively.  I normally use apt-get,
and tried aptitude after seeing that it was going to be the default,
but have since shied away from it.

> * However, I never do anything at the command line that hasn't been 
> verified as safe. I always use the curses interface to find out what is 
> going to happen before I enter a command at the command line.

I'm pretty sure that aptitude will provide a detailed list of packages
that it intends to remove, and unless you use the -y or --yes option
(assuming there is one), it was and is safe to at least try it out on
the command line.

Not sure I can explain why, but I prefer the command line interface over
an "environment" that you get into and navigate and control from within
(and sometimes may have trouble finding a way out of...).  I do use
and have learned vi/vim, so I'm not unwilling to do this kind of thing,
but plan to stick with apt-get on the command line until there's some
compelling reason to do so.

I also tried wajig, which is a wrapper around apt-get and some other
commands, but find that I prefer using the "real thing" directly.

Ken

-- 
Ken Irving, fnkci+debianuser@uaf.edu