Re: essential packages getting deleted when switching to testing libc6
On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 02:21:53PM +0100, Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
> André Neves wrote:
> >> The main difference is that aptitude is now prefered over apt-get.
> >
> > Sorry, preferred by who?
>
> By the debian developers. From
> /usr/share/doc/aptitude/README
>
> > What is this aptitude thing, anyway?
> >
> > aptitude is a featureful package manager for Debian GNU/Linux systems, based on
> > the renowned apt package management infrastructure. aptitude provides the
> > functionality of dselect and apt-get, as well as many additional features not
> > found in either program.
>
> IIRC, it's mainly the better algorithms to resolve dependencies and the
> ability to distinguish between packages that are automatically installed
> vs manually installed, that have been introduced in aptitude, but not in
> apt-get.
now (since months in lenny) this last functionality is also in apt-get
(I suppose that it is infact in libapt, and so is exactly the same in
aptitude and apt-get). An evident difference between apt-get and
aptitude is their command line incompatibility; moreover a look at their
man pages shows that some useful functionality of aptitude is not
available in apt-get, but also that in a _few_ cases the converse is
true.
The fact that aptitude and apt-get have quite different dependency
resolution algorithms is, *luckly*, still completly true. You and many
others probably have noted some cases where aptitude algorithm had
worked well, but apt-get does not. I also (rarely) meet such cases.
I, and others with old hardware, have noted that aptitude algorithm is
_much_ slower on old hardware. I also regularly meet cases where
aptitude algorithm is _spectacularly_ not working (either it does not
find a solution, or it proposes only solutions where it proposes to
uninstall almost everything) and apt-get works almost flawelessly (the
last example in an upgrade to lenny a few days ago: aptitude failed as
specified, apt-get did a perfect job requiring the uninstallation of a
single package: aptitude. Curiously, once the upgrade has been
completed, it was possible to install aptitude without problems).
[Please note: I have NO trace of gnome, kde, xfce, udev, hal, ... on my
machines; I have OLD packages (some from at least potato times, some
self-compliled) installed, and I am able to manually edit
/var/lib/dpkg/status to correct dependencies of these old installed
packages to make them compatible with modern debian distributions
(moreover, I have without problems multiple distributions in
sources.list provided that preferences uses suitable pinnings. I also
have chroots for older debian distributions).]
Finally, the mailing list archives contain *many* old discussions about
apt-get vs aptitute and everyone can read them.
My conclusion? For a newbie with modern hardware and with a modern
interest in modern GUIs, recommendation of aptitude seems absolutely
reasonable. For old timers debian users, well, they _know_ that there
are cases where aptitude is better tha apt-get and cases where the
contrary is true, and so they know when and how to use one or the other.
--
Chi usa software non libero avvelena anche te. Digli di smettere.
Informatica=arsenico: minime dosi in rari casi patologici, altrimenti letale.
Informatica=bomba: intelligente solo per gli stupidi che ci credono.
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