The Wanderer <wande...@fastmail.fm> writes: > I remember, years ago, I asked on some Debian list what the intended > replacement for apt-cache was, since 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.
For a while, we were recommending people use aptitude for upgrades instead of apt-get because the dependency resolver did a better job. That's probably where the "deprecated" part came from, as that recommendation did get reported that way. However, time marches on, and the apt-get resolver has gotten better. I think both programs have their place. Personally, I'd recommend the apt tool for command-line package installation because I think its defaults are safer and less confusing. But it has no equivalent to aptitude for a curses-based examination of the packages on the system and new packages now available, which is a rather nice feature. In terms of dependency resolvers, I think a reasonably fair way to characterize them is that apt-get errs on the side of caution and can default to refusing to do anything, whereas aptitude tries a lot harder to find a dependency solution that changes the system at the cost of generating a lot of bogus solutions. My personal experience is that, when I have a difficult or complex dependency issue on a system, the *second* solution offered by aptitude is usually better than the only solution offered by apt-get (mostly because apt-get usually gives up), but the *first* solution offered by aptitude is usually awful and sometimes actually destructive. I always found that pattern strange and kind of amusing, but it's surprising how reliable "run aptitude and take the second thing it suggests" is in resolving weird dependency problems. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- 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/871tk3eqa5....@hope.eyrie.org
