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.