On Oct 29, 2007, at 9:49 PM, Daniel Burrows wrote:
Also, I was trying to gently point out that there's more to aptitude than the command-line. Excluding generic shared code, the rest ofaptitude is about 6 times larger than the command-line interface, and itwould be nice to think people occasionally use all that stuff. :-) Ioccasionally notice people writing that they just discovered aptitude'scurses interface after using it for ages, so I know that this isn't universally known.
Ahhhh! I see. You were doing a little marketing for the CUI. :-)I actually knew about the curses interface before I ever tried the command-line... and like it more, since it has more powerful features. But then again, I was coming from dselect, and very used to that curses interface years and years ago.
I think the niftiest feature (and one that still has me scratching my head as to how you accomplished it) is the MOUSE control in curses over SSH from a WINDOWS box?! That's amazing.
(In case you're not sure what I mean... get on a Windows box, fire up PuTTY (I'm sure PuTTY is also "helping" in this scenario somehow) and then click on the menu items in the curses interface with a mouse. Whoa... it works? I stumbled across that by accident one day, and it's one of my favorite things to show programmers who think they're really good curses programmers... "Can you make your app do THIS?" Heh heh. Wild.)
aptitude is by far one of the best package management tools out there. Newbies and folks really stuck in the graphic-oriented/desktop user world may like synaptic better, but for just getting things done -- aptitude wins hands down, almost all the time.
-- Nate Duehr nate@natetech.com