Re: Jessie --> Stretch upgrade, apt question
On Sun, Jun 25, 2017 at 11:18:46AM +0200, Dejan Jocic wrote:
> 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.
>
Hmmm. So we end up using apt-get for major version upgrades (according
to the recommendations of the release notes), apt most of the time
(according to the recommendation of all the tools, including apt-get,
when the slightest thing goes wrong), and aptitude when neither apt-get
or apt have a good way to do something? Seems like this area of Debian
could use a cleanup.
Thanks for the reply though.
Mark
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