Re: Was: Ric Moore
On Mon, 19 Jan 2015 04:54:57 -0500
Gene Heskett <gheskett@wdtv.com> wrote:
>
> But that leads to the next logical question: What's the difference
> between using apt-get to do that, and synaptic?
>
> Synaptic would have literally torn down the system, removing libc6,
> most of build-essentials among many many others. I like synaptic,
> but that difference is an eye opener for sure.
>
By default, Synaptic arrives with everything turned on: it does a
full-upgrade/dist-upgrade, it treats recommends as dependencies, etc.
All of this can be disabled, just as it can be enabled in apt-get or
aptitude.
Horses for courses: they all do the same basic job, but with slightly
different features. If I want to install, remove or purge a single
application I know about, or do a routine upgrade, I normally use
aptitude non-interactively. Nearly all my upgrade work is with unstable,
and that does get into difficult situations from time to time, when some
packages can't be upgraded without significant removals. I usually
switch to Synaptic then, in which I find I can most easily set up the
combinations of upgradable packages which work.
I upgrade my unstable workstation pretty much every day, but I have
three or four other unstables which are used much more rarely, and get
upgraded every few months, when I have the time. Aptitude is good at
sorting out dependencies, supposedly still better than apt-get, but if
you throw five or six hundred upgrades at it, it does often freak out
and it sits there literally for hours working out combinations... so for
these large-scale upgrades, an apt-get upgrade followed by a
dist-upgrade seems to be the optimal choice. I don't generally do these
occasional upgrades while there is a pending problem with unstable, so
I don't usually have difficulties.
--
Joe
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