Re: Apt-Get or Aptitude

[Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org>]

On Mon, Oct 29, 2007 at 12:14:18AM -0600, Nate Duehr <nate@natetech.com> was heard to say:
>
> On Oct 28, 2007, at 11:06 AM, Daniel Burrows wrote:
>>  I'd say the main difference is that apt-get is a command-line tool,
>> whereas aptitude is an interactive tool that can be driven from the
>> command-line.
>
>
> I would disagree.  Aptitude supports command-line operation as well as 
> interactive.

  What I meant by that is that the project's goals and focus have always
been on interactivity.  This isn't a matter of excluding particular
lines of development, but most of the work that goes into aptitude is
weighted towards its interactive features.  That's one reason, for
instance, that the "show" output from the command-line is prettier
than in apt-get, but slower and less useful to scripts.  These
deficiencies could be corrected, but they are lower-priority than, say,
improving interactive dependency handling and fixing UI glitches.

  Also, I was trying to gently point out that there's more to aptitude
than the command-line.  Excluding generic shared code, the rest of
aptitude is about 6 times larger than the command-line interface, and it
would be nice to think people occasionally use all that stuff. :-)  I
occasionally notice people writing that they just discovered aptitude's
curses interface after using it for ages, so I know that this isn't
universally known.

  Daniel