On 03/31/2015 at 09:18 AM, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote: > On Tue, Mar 31, 2015, at 05:14, Fabian Greffrath wrote: > >> I am curious why the aptitude package still has Priority: standard, >> i.e. why it is installed next to apt in each and every Debian >> installation? >> >> Aptitude isn't recommended for dist-upgrading since Lenny, I >> think. >> >> Do we really need to have two CLI package management tools >> installed, is this reasonable? > > Well, aptitude IS the CLI package manager. As far as I know, it is > also the most complete and advanced package manager Debian has. Make > no mistake: aptitude is the Debian package manager you should be > using if you can deal with text mode and the command line. > > apt-get is the simple tool everyone knows about, though. It also > needs another simple tools like apt-cache to be really usable. We > can't very well leave them out of the "standard" Debian system, based > on popularity alone. And the dependency resolver in apt-get is often > far easier to tailor for dist-upgrade than the one in aptitude.
Not for dist-upgrade alone; it's far saner and easier to handle in _most_ cases, in my experience. Repeatedly over the years - I'd almost say consistently - I've seen aptitude report that a requested package change (install, remove, or some combination) would result in an invalid or conflicting dependency situation, and suggest a solution which involves _not making the change which was requested_. If the requested configuration is, in fact, contradictory, then this is of course reasonable. However, in most if not all such cases, requesting the same change of apt-get produces a workable dependency solution immediately. Sometimes (when I've bothered to stick with it long enough), telling aptitude "no, try again" a few dozen times (and rejecting "solutions" which would downgrade or remove dozens, if not hundreds, of packages along the way) will eventually get it to suggest a solution which will make that change without extraneous side effects - which may or may not be the same as the one provided by apt-get. But as long as aptitude continues to take this brain-dead approach to dependency resolution, necessitating digging through obviously-bad suggestions before finding something as reasonable as what apt-get provides easily, it is IMO not viable for actual use - except perhaps by people who already know completely what they are doing and how to override aptitude's suggestions. If there's a way to configure aptitude not to do that already, then that configuration should be the default. (Note that I have not seen this recently, for the simple reason that I've rarely bothered _trying_ aptitude for actual package-management changes in years; however, every single time I _have_ tried it, I've seen this behavior in some form. The only things I still use aptitude for are 'aptitude why' and 'aptitude why-not', since there does not appear to be any analog to those on the apt or apt-get side.) > That said, apt-get / apt-cache are simplified package management > tools. They're useful, and easier to tailor to the dist-upgrade > process. However, for day-to-day use, apt-get/apt-cache have nowhere > near all the capabilities of a fully featured package manager like > aptitude. You can probably duplicate most of aptitude's > functionality with apt-get+apt-cache+lots of scripting nowadays, but > still... Does aptitude include an equivalently functional analog for apt-cache? I remember, years ago, I asked on some Debian list what the intended replacement for apt-cache was, since I'd been told that apt-get was deprecated in favor of aptitude and I'd seen that aptitude did not seem to have equivalents for the apt-cache commands. I was told that apt-cache was not going away, and that the "deprecated" claim was probably incorrect. As far as I recall, however, no one disputed the idea that aptitude did not have such equivalents. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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