Re: apt-get vs Aptitude

[Frans Pop <elendil@planet.nl>]

Franklin PIAT wrote:
> My rational is that some setup runs apt* updates automatically. If a
> user later use "aptitude install foo", it would install those updates
> too [...]

This is just not true.

# aptitude update
[...]
Fetched 5450kB in 5s (1079kB/s)
Reading package lists... Done
There are now 3 updates [+3], 23 new [+23].

# aptitude install libcap-dev
[...]
The following packages have been kept back:
  libpq5{a} tar wget
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libcap-dev libcap1{a}
0 packages upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded.
Need to get 29.4kB of archives. After unpacking 176kB will be used.

As you can see the 3 updated packages are _not_ being installed, but are
kept back. Only the requested package (and its deps) gets installed.

I personally use apt-get and aptitude completely interchangeably, while
mostly using aptitude. I almost always use aptitude interactively for
upgrades because it allows me to prune new recommends I don't want.

Cheers,
FJP