Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: > It's tangential to the main topic of this thread, but you might want to > give /usr/bin/apt a try: it abstracts over apt-get / apt-cache, offering > a single CLI entry point to (some of) the functionalities of both.
I've used the new apt tool, and I do find it quite an improvement over apt-get, but I still have several use cases for which I currently use aptitude and for which I do not see an obvious alternative with apt: - Every time I update, aptitude lets me browse newly added packages, which I find quite helpful to keep up with what's being added in sid or experimental. - aptitude has a powerful search language, which I have not seen any equivalent for in apt. For instance, I frequently use searches like "?not(?automatic) ?reverse-Depends(?installed)", which shows me packages I probably want to mark as automatic. And in addition to search queries, aptitude supports limiting the current package list to packages match a search query, or showing packages on the command line that match a query. (grep-dctrl is probably the closest equivalent, but its query language isn't as powerful, not least of which because it doesn't provide composeable expressions like ?reverse-Depends(?installed).) - aptitude provides a curses-style UI, which makes it easy to browse packages. I can search for a package by various means, see its description, quickly browse its dependencies (seeing at a glance which ones I already have installed), and navigate from a package to its dependencies and their dependencies, then back up. From this UI, I can quickly operate on an entire set of packages; for instance, I can hit M on the section heading for "libs" to mark all libraries as automatic, or on the dependency list for a metapackage to mark all dependencies of that metapackage as automatic. I can also stage operations incrementally, such as marking some packages for installation, reviewing the result, and incrementally modifying it until it looks like what I want. - aptitude's UI shows lists of packages with a consistent set of information, rather than just a bare list of package names that's harder to scan. I find it much easier in aptitude to see what a daily upgrade will change. And if something is broken, (e.g. a package in unstable that depends on a package only in experimental), aptitude makes that fairly obvious, while apt just says that it didn't upgrade that package. - aptitude's UI makes it easy to see held packages at a glance. Those are some of the reasons I use aptitude. I'd love to see some of these use cases addressed in apt. I actually *don't* particularly care for the aptitude dependency resolver, particularly since it often seems to miss obvious solutions in favor of awful ones; for instance, if I'm attempting to install one package from experimental that depends on another package from experimental, the correct answer is "install the other package from experimental", not "cancel installation of the package I asked for", and definitely not "uninstall half the system". It's easy enough to tell aptitude what I actually want, by hitting R and A to reject or accept parts of solutions, but apt more frequently seems to choose the right thing to do on the first try. (Not always, but more often.) - Josh Triplett -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20150331180018.GA2483@jtriplet-mobl1