Re: apt-get

[thib <thib@stammed.net>]

Both can achieve basically the same thing, but the real difference (IMO) is 
in their respective goals/directions/purposes.

apt-* tools have become relatively complex over the years, and can be 
considered a "low-level" interface to APT.  To be clear, they're not *that* 
complex, but you get the idea.  One could say that they are mainly useful 
for scripting or "uncommon" tasks.

aptitude is a higher level CLI and CUI (ncurses) tool that wraps around 
apt-* tools.  You can see that many little things make it more useable for a 
user.  For example, issuing 'aptitude update' will automatically check the 
cache and output the number of upgrades available so that you don't have to 
issue '(safe|full)-upgrade' to find out.  Every output is basically reworked 
to be more readable/useful for a human (another example:  'apt-cache show' 
vs 'aptitude show').  Inputs are supposedly more intuitive as well (compare 
'apt-cache search' and 'aptitude search').  This is all obviously very 
subjective, and one might be perfectly OK without aptitude's "help", but 
once again, you get the idea:  aptitude wraps/aggregates everything a *user* 
might need in a single place and provides a more suitable interface for a 
*user*.  As such, it's mostly useless for another program, and thus should 
probably not be used for scripting.

Some people may have other opinions, and a technical comparison is still 
meaningful in some cases (is the dependency-resolver still different for the 
two?);  I'm just not sure it's worth the trouble - one should just use what 
he knows will work best for the task at hand, because the real difference 
will most certainly be about comfort.

-thib