On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 07:51:30PM -0800, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> The "expected" workflow in aptitude is that you pick all the changes
> you want to make, then ask aptitude to show you all the changes that
> will be made (including ones that were required by your past changes).
> If you like it, you confirm that it's OK and aptitude applies the
> changes.
Then how do you know what changes cause what? Are you going through
the list and somehow trace back all the dependencies to figure that
out? And when you make another change, you have to start all over
again?
BTW, how do you tell aptitude to tell you what it would do? I just
started it and couldn't figure that out. I would like to see what it
would do without me making any changes.
> The "expected" workflow in dselect is that as you pick each change
> that you want to make, dselect jumps to a screen where it tells you all
> the other changes it's about to make because they were required by what
> you just did. If you like them, you confirm that they're OK and
> dselect drops you back to the main package list. Once you've finished
> picking changes, you tell dselect to proceed with applying them all.
Yeah, very easy and straightforward :) Can you configure aptitude to
do that?
> Believe me, there are people who hate the dselect model just as
> passionately as you hate how aptitude does it; aptitude was deliberately
> designed to be different for just this reason. Luckily, we still have
> both options and you can use the one that works for you. :-)
As far as I understood it, it was supposed to replace dselect because
it has some advantages in how it's managing the packages. Since
aptitude came out, I'm afraid that deselect might be removed some day.
Maybe I even come to like to aptitude if I can figure it out.
If you can't figure it out, that doesn't mean it sucks.