On Sun, Jun 25, 2017 at 11:18:46AM +0200, Dejan Jocic wrote: > On 25-06-17, Mark Fletcher wrote: > > Hello the list! > > > > I have upgraded this weekend from Jessie to Stretch. All went, overall, > > reasonably smoothly -- the documentation around releases is getting > > better and better. I plan to write a full report of the upgrade and > > share it here shortly. In the meantime I have one question. > > > > It seems like aptitude is falling out of favour in stretch, and apt as a > > command line tool as opposed to the name for the general entire package > > management system is being recommended these days. I've never been a > > huge fan of apt-get (although to be fair that means little more than I > > settled on aptitude [command-line version not ncurses version] and > > learned its quirks a long time ago) and so I am, somewhat reluctantly, > > making the switch to apt from aptitude. apt has a couple of features I > > really like, but I do wish apt show made it easier to tell if a package > > is installed -- you have to read a lot further down the info to find > > out. > > > > My question is that since the upgrade chromium is held back from > > upgrading, and in this new world I don't know how to find out why. In > > aptitude I would have done aptitude why-not chromium and it would most > > likely have told me something useful about its dependencies. How can I > > get apt to do similar? Or what tool should I use? > > > > I'm aware that apt-cache depends chromium will tell me what it depends > > on, but that doesn't tell me what is stopping it from being upgraded. > > > > sudo apt upgrade and sudo apt full-upgrade both just tell me chromium > > has been kept back, but not why. > > > > sudo apt --fix-broken install finds nothing to do. > > > > Suggestions would be much appreciated. > > > > Mark > > > > In short, use aptitude for why and why-not. Closest thing apt-get and > friends have would be apt-cache --important depends/rdepends. But, > aptitude is much better suited for that task. And for all other tasks > that involve advanced searching, as far as I could tell. As for apt > itself, would not know exactly, I refuse to use tool with man page that > treats me like an idiot, while not giving me anything new and important > compared to apt-get and friends. But guess would be that it is apt > --important depends/rdepends. And probably not more helpful than > apt-cache variant. >
Hmmm. So we end up using apt-get for major version upgrades (according to the recommendations of the release notes), apt most of the time (according to the recommendation of all the tools, including apt-get, when the slightest thing goes wrong), and aptitude when neither apt-get or apt have a good way to do something? Seems like this area of Debian could use a cleanup. Thanks for the reply though. Mark