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Re: apt-get vs. aptitude



Le 09.10.2013 15:39, Richard Owlett a écrit :

berenger.morel@neutralite.org wrote:



Le 08.10.2013 16:15, Richard Owlett a écrit :
[snip]


I'm experimenting with a very lean idiosyncratic install. It
sounds
as aptitude will be appropriate for me. Off to read man pages
etc ;)


Don't copy me! xD
More seriously, without aptitude, I would probably not be with
debian ( probably I would have stayed with windows, that I known
better some years ago ), and it is really that tool which allowed
me to have fast as lighting computers built from low-price
hardware ( but no one that I know could use any of my systems if
I am far away ).

You might also be interested by dselect, I have read about it
several times, but never took enough time to really discover it.

My first moves when installing a new system: uncheck all ( yes,
including basic tools ) checkboxes while installing, booting on
the new system, disabling in aptitude the automatic install of
recommended stuff, and install only packages that I invoke by
myself.

Sometimes I take some fun to also purge all packages ( yes, all
of them: go to root entry of aptitude and then press '_' ) to add
them back one by one in the preview, marking all packages I do
not remove as automatically installed ( so that they'll go away
when there will be no reason to keep them ). It's nice to see
that Debian still install some tools which are not really needed
when you uncheck everything at install time.

Be careful, that way to install a computer is the best one to
install broken systems :) but I'll bet that you know that ( it's
more a disclaimer for people who could fall on that mail )



AMEN to last paragraph. But those broken systems can be educational.
I'm a newbie whose learning style is very hands on, with a laptop
devoted ONLY to experimenting with installs. Yesterday's education was 
titled "How small can a NEWBIE make a working XFCE system?".

Your post, among others, encouraged me to try leaving "basic tools"
unchecked.
I followed with "apt-get --no-install-recommends lightdm xfce4". On
reboot I got a blinking cursor. ONLY a blinking cursor - couldn't
discover a way to do anything. Got to a terminal, purged lightdm and
xfce4 and reinstalled.
You should try to not install display managers, and then starting your XFCE installation with startx, on a TTY. Without recommended packages, you should have a working DE like this ( only used GDM and XDM IIRC, but using none since many months now). Also, since I also started on XFCE I think I can say that without too much errors, you could have some fun installing XFCE's packages one by one, instead of relying on the meta-packages. The first time I did this was to remove orage, since I had no use for it and it was a dependency, where I would have loved it to be a simple recommendation.
And, purging them will not remove all packages they might have installed through recommendations, since those recommendations are often shared with other tools you have. Purging stuff only removes configuration files in /etc after ( or not after, I do not know nor mind ) having removed the software, nothing more, nothing less. 


The lesson learned? That whether or not something is a dependency is
in eyes of beholder. LOL
I apologize, but I have no idea about what does means "eye of the beholder". 


Beneficial side effect - guided reading of the
description/recommends/suggests fields of packages.


To know what a program can do, reading them is truly very useful.
But sometimes, it is interesting to use the reverse of that feature: reading packages which are in need of a target, for example, Qt, Gtk, python... in order to purge your system of technologies you do not want for a reason or another. Doing this with perl is especially fun, same for all "mandatory" packages. You won't become a sysadmin like that, but you might learn what is really useful or not.
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