Re: apt-get vs. aptitude
On 2013-10-13 Dmitrii Kashin wrote:
> I think that aptitude works quite well for the easiest cases. And it is
> the only instrument I know which allow to see dependency chains. It was
> dselect some time ago which could do it too as I know, but now it seems
> to be dead. BTW, it provides with good capabilities for searching
> through packages.
Remember that aptitude has evolved quite a bit. The scenarios that you
and some others describe are not necessarily pertinent anymore. When you
use phrases like "fond memories", please state how old these memories are
;). Any package manager, needless to say, is wholly dependent on the
metadata in the packages, so if these are not sensible, they may come up
with rash solutions. The great thing about aptitude (to me) is that it is
so easy to leaf through "broken" packages, using the 'b' key in the
curses interface, and then examine what the matter is with each package.
Most often, I find that I can solve dependency problems by simply not
upgrading one or more packages. You do that easily by typing 'v' on a
broken package and then typing '+' on the already installed version. If
using the resolver instead, the solution presented is often to remove the
package or some other package. For instance, at the moment the package
xul-ext-greasemonkey is marked as upgradable on my system, but the
package's metadata has Iceweasel in a non-installable version as a
dependency. Aptitude wants to remove xul-ext-greasemonkey and apt-get
wants to remove Iceweasel. None of these solutions may be what you want,
so simply keeping xul-ext-greasemonkey in the already installed version
is an alternative that the command line solutions in the two package
managers do not present the user.
Morten
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