Re: package management begins to annoy me
Roger Leigh wrote :
> On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 05:28:13PM -0600, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:
>> On Thursday 26 February 2009 16:34:38 Ron Johnson wrote:
>>> On 02/26/2009 03:20 PM, Urs Thuermann wrote:
>>>> So, am I doing something completely wrong here?
>>> Yes, you're using aptitude. Return to the apt* which God intended
>>> us to use: apt-get.
>> Ignore Ron. Aptitude has been the recommended (by DDs) package manager
>> since Etch was released. It has better dependency resolution, is more user-
>> friendly, and is a bit more tunable.
>
> "Better" dependency resolution is subjective. While it's certainly
> cleverer and more complex, aptitude often fails to do the right thing
> where the simpler algorithm apt-get uses behaves correctly.
>
> For example, 'aptitude upgrade' often wants to remove packages where
> 'apt-get upgrade' would just keep them back. It offers multiple
> solutions to problems, but not the simplest solution of not upgrading
> to the current version.
>
> In many cases, the simpler apt-get algorithm for upgrade and
> dist-upgrade Does The Right Thing where aptitude does not. IMHO the
> additional complexity makes aptitude less user friendly. I wouldn't
> be surprised if apt-get doesn't become the recommended upgrade tool
> for Squeeze; unless aptitude fixes its algorithm to work better in
> common cases, without requiring user action to solve dependency
> problems, I will support such a change.
>
>
> Regards,
> Roger
>
Hi, just sharing a user experience with aptitude, which I use. You do
have a point about apparent simplicity regarding apt-get, most of the
time it just seems to "work", period. It is all the more true since many
users just see it through a gui, and synaptic is a nice tool.
But when running a system which is a mix of testing, sid and
experimental, plus a few debian-multimedia goodies thrown in, aptitude
performs better. In this situation I am really happy that aptitude is
showing me the nuts and bolts of the tricky dependencies resolutions,
giving me the opportunity to take the final decision (wrecking my system
or not ;-) ). I don't consider it's "verbosity" as being a problem.
In the same situation apt-get often just can't get through, and leaves
me with dpkg to manually install a few packages before apt-get works
again. Off course I am *not* overlooking the possibility that I am just
too dumb to get apt-get to work, but then the simplicity argument just
drops.
The main drawback I find in aptitude is the learning curve, to simply
use the cli search function in an efficient way the user has to go
through a lot of fine manual pages, with non idiot friendly patterns and
regex to remember. But at least it is still aptitude options when apt
would require the use of additional tools (like apt-cache). The ncurse
interface is a bit better, but lacks user-friendliness in many aspects.
I thing aptitude will effectively become the popular choice when
aptitude-gtk is ready, giving a lot of flexibility to the user from the
cli to the full-blown gui.
Just my humble user experience.
Tom
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