Re: Automatic installs

Excellent. Thanks, Andrei,

On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 7:10 PM, Andrei POPESCU <andreimpopescu@gmail.com> wrote:

On Ma, 19 nov 13, 17:28:27, Brad Alexander wrote:
> Sorry. Replied privately instead of to the list...

And I'll elaborate on my short reply as promised.

> Way back in the mists of time, around the time of the squeeze release, I
> asked here and it was recommended to use apt rather than aptitude...
>
> I'm guessing the best practice has changed...?

Each has its strengths and weaknesses and I use both:

- on my sid laptop I have an aptitude in interactive mode open all the
time, to keep the system updated (almost daily), to look up package
information, to check out new packages, to remove obsolete ones and
other general maintenance of the system

I've tried the interactive mode, but it reminds me too much of dselect. :) I started using Debian around 1999 (slink?), and it was pre- or early-days of apt. I could never get through the install, because I had a mental block against dselect. Try as I might, I can't get past the resemblance of aptitude's interactive mode.

- for a quick search by name or description I use 'apt-cache search',
because it's faster

I use apt-cache and apt-file together on both my workstation and laptop.

- for complex searches (and possibly actions on the set of packages a
search would return) aptitude is better
- for maintenance of stable systems I prefer apt-get (update && upgrade
&& dist-upgrade) because it's fast and simple.

Agreed. this is the only way I upgrade. I run a sid desktop and a sid laptop. However, I don't upgrade nearly as often. I run apticron to keep an eye on critical packages, either function or urgency.

- for quickly installing a package I prefer apt-get (faster) except for
my sid system where aptitude is already open
- etc.

Recently aptitude's dependency resolver also couldn't come up with
reasonable solutions for some transitions in sid, so I used apt-get
instead.

I have seen this too. I'm not a fan of the dependency resolution in aptitude. Generally, it gives me a number of non-optimal solutions. I'm not sure what logic gets used, but I have seen cases where it wants to uninstall major portions of the system because a package needs to be upgraded.

For a dist-upgrade you should use whatever is advised in the Release

Notes for that release, regardless of your usual preferences.

Actually, nowadays, I end up having to dist-upgrade to get new kernels, etc. Which kind of defeats the *dist* part of dist-upgade.

Regards,

--b