(Sorry for the delay in replying; I had a response within minutes, but I've been having bizarre Internet-access issues all day, and I'm not even sure they're gone yet.)
On 04/01/2015 at 12:02 PM, Peter Samuelson wrote: > [The Wanderer] > >> 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. > > That sounds like you believe aptitude has only a command-line > interface. I was indeed only aware of its command-line interface, until just yesterday; comments in this thread mentioning a "curses interface" led me to experiment, and discover how to invoke that. So far as I recall, no documentation or other explanations which I've ever run across have so much as mentioned this interface, much less explained how to invoke it or described doing anything through it. The man page does not mention the term 'curses', and 'interactive' - which is the only other obvious term I can think of to search for when looking for something like this mode, even knowing that such a mode exists - could just as easily describe the "does this dependency solution look good to you?" mode of operation. I have yet to do much of anything with that interface, so I'm not currently competent to speak about it one way or another. >> Does aptitude include an equivalently functional analog for >> apt-cache? > > Well, the things I use most - the 'show' and 'search' functions - > are certainly in aptitude, but apt-cache has a dozen other > subcommands and I don't know whether aptitude implements those in > some way. If I recall correctly, my original question was about a replacement for 'apt-cache policy', which is about the single most common thing I use apt-cache for - with show and search being probably second and third place, respectively. I have been unable to identify any aptitude analog for that functionality. >> 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. > > Deprecating /usr/bin/apt-get is not the same as deprecating the > whole apt package, including /usr/bin/apt-cache. If anyone said the > entire apt package was deprecated, I think they were misinformed. Having thought on it further, I believe what I'd actually been told at the time was that apt-get (or some other term, referring to that entire collection of tools) was no longer maintained and/or no longer developed, and that any new features etc. would go exclusively into aptitude, and that using apt-* was therefore not recommended. This would have been... sometime prior to either lenny or etch, I don't recall which. -- 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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