Re: Apt-Get or Aptitude
On Fri, Nov 02, 2007 at 07:25:58AM -0700, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 01, 2007 at 11:09:07AM -0800, Ken Irving <fnkci@uaf.edu> was heard to say:
> > > > On Tue, Oct 30, 2007 at 08:19:58PM -0700, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> > > No, I just come down hard on this meme because it seems to have taken
> > > on a life of its own and I'd like to squash it before it grows up into a
> > > full-blown urban legend.
> >
> > That sounds good, but is it different now than it used to be? I haven't
> > tried it lately, but it used to "seem" to want to remove lots of things.
> > I'm aware of the workarounds (keep-all or whatever), have followed most
> > of the threads (even instigated some...), but am still a command-line
> > apt-get user waiting for a reason to change. Two problems I have with
> > aptitude are the lack of "source" functionality and my inability to spell
> > it as easily as apt-get. ;-)
>
> There were bugs in some past versions. As far as I know, the worst
> ones (e.g., #411123) were fixed in etch. There were some new bugs
> introduced in unstable with the switchover to using apt to track unused
> packages (where aptitude would even want to remove packages it had just
> installed), but those should be fixed in 0.4.7.
>
> There are a few corner cases in which aptitude will do the wrong
> thing.
>
> * Marking a package for removal in aptitude, exiting, removing it with
> apt-get, installing it again with apt-get, then running aptitude.
> aptitude will still remember that you want to remove the package.
>
> * If you interrupt aptitude before it writes its state database, it
> will sometimes get confused about the system state, especially if
> you proceed to run apt-get before aptitude. (I can't remember the
> precise sequence of events that have to happen to trigger this off
> the top of my head)
>
> Those are the only ways I can think of offhand to get aptitude to
> remove packages you didn't ask it to. Unfortunately, there's no
> reliable way to tell if someone else has fiddled with a package
> (#429438), so as long as aptitude tries to save and restore the current
> state, there will be a few edge cases like this.
>
> Anything I didn't list above is a bug that I don't know about.
>
> Daniel
Thank you! I just did an aptitude upgrade, and that old remove-everything
problem is indeed gone, and no obscure workarounds needed.
FWIW, a "newubie doc" referenced earlier in this thread,
http://newbiedoc.berlios.de/wiki/Aptitude_-_using_together_with_Synaptic_and_Apt-get
perpetuates this particular meme, linking back to an old thread based
apparently on that bug.
Ken
--
Ken Irving, fnkci+debianuser@uaf.edu
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