I've recently bitten the bullet and switched from using dselect for package management to aptitude, seeing as it was supposed to be smarter in dealing with complex upgrades.
However, aptitude didn't deal at all well with the broken dependencies that crop up on my unstable box. The "upgrade what can be upgraded" command seems to upgrade at all costs, i. e. it will remove itself if it means getting a new apt version. When it recently suggested I should remove most of gnome just to bump the debian revision of one package I went looking for alternatives. There seem to be two types of apt frontends: old school: apt-get, dselect, synaptic (Default Upgrade). Those won't uninstall a working package unless you tell it to. "smart": aptitude, synaptic (Smart Upgrade) Those will remove a third of your installed packages in one go if you're not careful. Now I'm sure there's a reason for the new behaviour. Could someone please explain to me why the new-style tool behave like they do? After all, I'd rather wait with upgrading than lose functionality on a system. (Yes, I could manually hold back the packages it wants to remove, but that isn't too practical.) Regards C.
