Re: update hell

[Ben Caradoc-Davies <ben@transient.nz>]

On 01/08/18 11:11, Default User wrote:
> I was going to read up on:
> apt-get dist-upgrade -V -s
> But then today, I was able to do a full upgrade, using:
> sudo aptitude -Pvv update
> sudo aptitude -Pvv safe-upgrade
> sudo aptitude -Pvv full-upgrade
> Finally!
> Now, I'm sure using:
> apt-get dist-upgrade -V -s
> would have worked as well, although I thought I read somewhere that mixing
> apt-get and aptitude is not a good idea.

I do not know anything about that.

> Thanks again, Ben.
> And, btw . . .
> dpkg?
> apt-get?
> aptitude?
> apt?

synaptic? No love for synaptic?

> Would Debian please just settle on one, and stick with it?

They do different things at different levels and seem to play nicely 
together.

dpkg is the lowest level and manipulates files. apt-get will download 
them too, from various sources, and following distribution rules. apt is 
a friendlier higher-level command-line interface. aptitude is an ncurses 
frontend, good for browsing lists of packages. synaptic is like aptitude 
with a GTK frontend.

I only use dpkg and apt-get, but when I started with Debian, I used 
synaptic. I came from Red Hat / Fedora, and the only things I miss from 
rpm and yum are yum history (with atomic reverts) and the ability to 
install multiple concurrent kernel packages without the API versioning 
silliness of Debian (which cannot co-install both 4.17.6-2 and 4.17.8-1, 
for example, only one linux-image-4.17.0-1-amd64).

Kind regards,

--
Ben Caradoc-Davies <ben@transient.nz>
Director
Transient Software Limited <https://transient.nz/>
New Zealand