[Ma-linux] Re: [Novalug] "aptitude" wants to remove kernel-image

Jay Berkenbilt ejb@ql.org
Sun Sep 2 14:40:15 EDT 2007


Angelo Bertolli <angelo@freeshell.org> wrote:

> Jay Berkenbilt wrote:
>> I would recommend that option, though others may differ.  If you start
>> over again with etch (4.0) and discipline yourself to use only
>> aptitude to upgrade packages, you'll probably find your system to be
>> much more stable.  I notice that my etch and later systems are much
>> more stable with respect to package configuration than my previous
>> system.
>
> ... or NEVER use aptitude.  I don't know, I hear people talking about
> using aptitude all the time, but I've never liked it.  Maybe I'm just
> not smart enough.  I've always stuck with apt-get and have never had
> these problems.  And if you want a cli interface that's a little
> easier and smarter than apt-get, then use wajig.  Here are some things
> it does:

You can use aptitude from the command line pretty much as a drop-in
replacement for apt-get.  You don't have to run its interactive user
interface.  I never use it.  Instead of apt-get install, run aptitude
install, and so forth.  There are three differences I know of:

aptitude purge package  vs  apt-get --purge remove package
aptitude full-upgrade   vs  apt-get dist-upgrade
aptitude safe-upgrade   vs  apt-get upgrade

The full-upgrade and safe-upgrade are recent (post-etch) changes.

Also, aptitude doesn't have a "source" option, so you still have to do
apt-get source to download source packages.

I really feel that switching to aptitude is worth it.  You don't lose
anything, you get the same command line interface, you get an
interactive interface that's there if you want it and not needed if
you don't want it.  The only caveat is that if you start using it and
you've not been using it before, its tendency to want to remove things
it doesn't know you want is probably a killer.  But if you start from
scratch with a new install, you really should give it a try.

--Jay

-- 
Jay Berkenbilt <ejb@ql.org>
a.k.a. qjb@debian.org



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