On Sun, 2003-02-16 at 08:37, Michael P. Soulier wrote: > On 16/02/03 Alex Malinovich did speaketh: > > > Personally, I generally stick to apt-get and apt-cache for most of my > > maintenance work. But I'll never give up dselect. Aptitude makes no > > sense to me whatsoever. dselect just makes everything really simple. > > Though, from what I understand, I'm more likely to get odd, unbelieving, > > cross-eyed glances than "Me too's!" for that. :) > > I'm afraid of dselect. Every time I try to use it, it insists on > installing a bunch of crap that I didn't ask for.
Actually, this is primarily the reason that I like dselect. That list of "crap" is all of the recommends and suggests that are present in the package. A few years ago, I would have said this to be unnecessary, but with the Debian repository having how many thousands of packages now, there's really no way to know about all of the cool new things available all the time. I think the rationale behind it is that if, for example, you're installing cdrecord, you'd probably also want a front end for it. apt-get will just install it and then go away. dselect (and I'd imagine aptitude as well, to give it its fair credit :) will show you xcdroast because it's suggested by cdrecord. Generally speaking, if you just want to install a single package with no fuss, or if you want to upgrade all of your packages with no fuss, you use apt-get. (I'd also strongly suggest taking a look at apt-listchanges for seeing what's new with stuff.) If you want to see what all the new available stuff is, then you go with a frontend like dselect or aptitude. Personally, I find aptitude very counter-intuitive, but then again, this could be due to how I expect things to work in dselect. (I felt the same way about dselect when I first started using it. :) -- Alex
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