On Fri, 2009-02-27, 058, thveillon.debian wrote: > 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 ;-) ). Aptitude became much more useful to me when I found out about 'rejecting' (r) or 'accepting' (a) specific actions in the dependency resolver. Frequently, when modifying the installed package set in some way, I have certain set of requirements (for what I want to happen) that will be different next time. So I apply changes and then use the dependency resolver (if necessary) to accept/reject actions and soon aptitude gives me the solution I want (if it exists). There are _some_ times that I honestly don't know how any algorithm could know how I want to handle everything. In the past I have required upgrades to testing or sid of specific packages; later I decided to just put all of stable, testing, sid, experimental, and debian-multimedia in sources.list. I pin them appropriately, and aptitude handles all the different versions well; I can see all the available versions of a package in aptitude and each labeled as eg. 'testing'. My system might have packages spread all the way from stable to experimental (though usually the bulk is at stable or testing). And it all 'just works'! Last: I switched to Debian I think sometime after Sarge was released. I had been using Fedora. Fedora was an exciting experience coming from WindowsXP. The packaging system was amazing and learning Linux was great. BUT when I tried out Debian, aptitude was what hooked me (alongside Debian's package management), and it was exciting all over again (and soon yum/rpm seemed rather silly).
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