Re: Apt-Get or Aptitude
Ken Irving wrote:
> 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
NewbieDOC is a wiki, so you could easily change that and bring the document up
to date. :)
--
Chris.
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