Re: update hell

On Jul 31, 2018 23:15, "Ben Caradoc-Davies" <ben@transient.nz> wrote:

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

1) Kamaraju, thank you for the pointers to the reading material.

Time to read.

2) Ben, I didn't think to include synapticin the list until after I posted. I don't normally think of synaptic for general package management; I normally only use it if I am not sure what package (and dependencies) I am looking for, or just to browse for something interesting.

I did formerly use apt-get, but now use aptitude instead, because I read "somewhere" that aptitude has better dependency resolution.

Note: I only use command line aptitude. I find the graphical version of aptitude to be confusing, non-intuitive, and (for me) not particularly useful.