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Re: Jessie --> Stretch upgrade, apt question



On 25-06-17, Mark Fletcher wrote:
> Hello the list!
> 
> I have upgraded this weekend from Jessie to Stretch. All went, overall, 
> reasonably smoothly -- the documentation around releases is getting 
> better and better. I plan to write a full report of the upgrade and 
> share it here shortly. In the meantime I have one question.
> 
> It seems like aptitude is falling out of favour in stretch, and apt as a 
> command line tool as opposed to the name for the general entire package 
> management system is being recommended these days. I've never been a 
> huge fan of apt-get (although to be fair that means little more than I 
> settled on aptitude [command-line version not ncurses version] and 
> learned its quirks a long time ago) and so I am, somewhat reluctantly, 
> making the switch to apt from aptitude. apt has a couple of features I 
> really like, but I do wish apt show made it easier to tell if a package 
> is installed -- you have to read a lot further down the info to find 
> out.
> 
> My question is that since the upgrade chromium is held back from 
> upgrading, and in this new world I don't know how to find out why. In 
> aptitude I would have done aptitude why-not chromium and it would most 
> likely have told me something useful about its dependencies. How can I 
> get apt to do similar? Or what tool should I use?
> 
> I'm aware that apt-cache depends chromium will tell me what it depends 
> on, but that doesn't tell me what is stopping it from being upgraded.
> 
> sudo apt upgrade and sudo apt full-upgrade both just tell me chromium 
> has been kept back, but not why.
> 
> sudo apt --fix-broken install finds nothing to do.
> 
> Suggestions would be much appreciated.
> 
> Mark
> 

In short, use aptitude for why and why-not. Closest thing apt-get and
friends have would be apt-cache --important depends/rdepends. But,
aptitude is much better suited for that task. And for all other tasks
that involve advanced searching, as far as I could tell. As for apt
itself, would not know exactly, I refuse to use tool with man page that
treats me like an idiot, while not giving me anything new and important
compared to apt-get and friends. But guess would be that it is apt
--important depends/rdepends. And probably not more helpful than
apt-cache variant.


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