Excellent. Thanks, Andrei,
On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 7:10 PM, Andrei POPESCU <andreimpope...@gmail.com>wrote: > On Ma, 19 nov 13, 17:28:27, Brad Alexander wrote: > > Sorry. Replied privately instead of to the list... > > And I'll elaborate on my short reply as promised. > > > Way back in the mists of time, around the time of the squeeze release, I > > asked here and it was recommended to use apt rather than aptitude... > > > > I'm guessing the best practice has changed...? > > Each has its strengths and weaknesses and I use both: > > - on my sid laptop I have an aptitude in interactive mode open all the > time, to keep the system updated (almost daily), to look up package > information, to check out new packages, to remove obsolete ones and > other general maintenance of the system > I've tried the interactive mode, but it reminds me too much of dselect. :) I started using Debian around 1999 (slink?), and it was pre- or early-days of apt. I could never get through the install, because I had a mental block against dselect. Try as I might, I can't get past the resemblance of aptitude's interactive mode. > - for a quick search by name or description I use 'apt-cache search', > because it's faster > I use apt-cache and apt-file together on both my workstation and laptop. > - for complex searches (and possibly actions on the set of packages a > search would return) aptitude is better > - for maintenance of stable systems I prefer apt-get (update && upgrade > && dist-upgrade) because it's fast and simple. > Agreed. this is the only way I upgrade. I run a sid desktop and a sid laptop. However, I don't upgrade nearly as often. I run apticron to keep an eye on critical packages, either function or urgency. > - for quickly installing a package I prefer apt-get (faster) except for > my sid system where aptitude is already open > - etc. > > Recently aptitude's dependency resolver also couldn't come up with > reasonable solutions for some transitions in sid, so I used apt-get > instead. > I have seen this too. I'm not a fan of the dependency resolution in aptitude. Generally, it gives me a number of non-optimal solutions. I'm not sure what logic gets used, but I have seen cases where it wants to uninstall major portions of the system because a package needs to be upgraded. > For a dist-upgrade you should use whatever is advised in the Release > Notes for that release, regardless of your usual preferences. > Actually, nowadays, I end up having to dist-upgrade to get new kernels, etc. Which kind of defeats the *dist* part of dist-upgade. Regards, --b
