On Tue, Apr 08, 2014 at 09:27:06AM +0200, Bastian Venthur wrote:
> If I remember correctly aptitude and apt-get do not use the same data
> base for keeping track of packages which where only installed to fulfill
> dependencies of other packages. Is this still true in general and
> specifically with apt?
Let me clarify:
aptitude implemented tracking of "automatically-installed" vs.
"manually-installed" packages first. The feature got later backported
by its author to libapt-pkg, which both, aptitude and apt, use.
("apt" includes in this context also frontends like synaptics).
The question is when this was the case:
apt (0.6.44.2exp1) experimental; urgency=low
[…]
* added support for aptitude like auto-install tracking (a HUGE
HUGE thanks to Daniel Burrows who made this possible)
[…]
-- Michael Vogt <mvo@debian.org> Mon, 3 Jul 2006 21:50:31 +0200
aka: If you don't happen to run oldoldoldoldstable (Debian 3.1 "sarge")
this isn't true, regardless of how often it is said in discussions
about "aptitude vs apt" – probably by people who weren't around at the
time it was true (like myself).
In reality aptitude, apt, synaptics, … share not only states, but also
quiet a bit of code in libapt-pkg and you can mix and match using them
as much as you might want to (which btw is also the reason why you can
laugh about anyone who claims to have removed 'apt' in favor of
'aptitude' from the system).
That said, there really is some state which isn't shared: aptitude
has its own packages-on-hold state and might ignore holds set by others
(via dpkg) at times, but that is a long-standing bug #137771 in it.
The general case is that everything is shared and if not it is a bug,
so your Lackmus test can be: If someone says something about apt, but
doesn't reference changelogs/bugreports, it is probably outdated and/or
downright wrong (applies to all projects older than a few years though).
Best regards
David Kalnischkies
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