Tom H wrote at 2013-10-12 18:40 -0500:
I suspect that the problem's in the examples above are simply
PEBKAC.
I use aptitude, and find it to be *more* useful than apt because of
its *interactive* dependency resolver. Probably if people have
trouble with aptitude it is because the package selection scoring
(which is configurable) is not quite perfect for all cases and they
do
not know about the interactive resolver (normally accessed with `e`)
when a package is marked as "broken".
The resolver allows the user to mark a particular suggestion of the
resolver (eg. "remove gnome") as *rejected* (`r`). The resolver will
never suggest that action again and will usually soon find an
appropriate action, or that there is no possible action to satisfy
both the user and dependencies.
This feature of aptitude is somewhat more useful to me because I have
some extra repositories enabled beside Debian stable (I also use
pinning).