Brian wrote: > But what do we think about this as a procedure? [1] > > apt-get update > apt-get -y upgrade > aptitude -y upgrade > apt-get -y dist-upgrade > aptitude -y dist-upgrade > apt-get -y autoremove
I first see that and it shocks me somewhat. I didn't understand why there would be a recommendation to use apt-get and aptitude one after the other. Usually those are alternatives and so it would be one or the other. I go look at the bug you referenced and read the discussion. My comments further down. I wouldn't ever recommend dist-upgrade -y. It just might produce a bad solution and will then want to remove everything. Just recently on 2015-02-28 my Sid system tried for the new perl packages. Due to some issue the upgrade surrounding libcommon-sense-perl wanted to remove everything associated with perl on my system. I needed to wait for the next archive update before it was settled. It just isn't safe for an automated upgrade. It is possible to configure apt specifically with APT::Get::Remove "false" to avoid this but that would get in the way of normal use of apt. Running upgrade -y with is fine. I don't see a way to get in trouble with it. This illustrates one of the reasons I think 'upgrade' is still very valuable even when also needing to run dist-upgrade. You can fire off upgrade -y without fear or nervousness. Then when running dist-upgrade the problem is simpler and the review of the actions is also much simpler. > When asked about it the response was [1]: > > First apt-get upgrade does the easy upgrades. > Then aptitude upgrade does the slightly harder upgrades (new packages). > Then apt-get dist-upgrade does the easy dist-upgrades. > Then aptitude dist-upgrade does the harder dist-upgrades where manual > intervention via the GUI might be needed. > > [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=780028 I have these thoughts about it. But I am rushed and didn't spend a huge amount of time with a considered opinion. 1. I don't think it *should* be needed to run aptitude after having run apt-get. The goal of those programs is to be equivalent in end result. They are completely different however and might not actually accomplish the same result. I think if it is then it is simply an accident that exists at this moment in time and won't be necessary in previous or later releases. 2. The only times I have seen the need for running one of aptitude or apt-get instead of the other one was due to bugs and deficiencies in the solution engine. Time goes by. People have improved both since the last round of issues that I remember. In a previous Debian release aptitude had been recommended due to this. Time passed and code changes were implemented all around. Now it is back to being the reverse. In many ways friendly competition here helps both. 3. Having read the bug discussion I see they are concerned about what appears to me to be "the accidental solution result" of the two to be different in that particular case. (Which I don't want to mention because I don't want to rathole into that topic here and just mentioning it would.) I didn't see it as a general issue either way. 4. My understanding (possibly flawed) is that aptitude's upgrade is a dist-upgrade. And therefore they have undocumented use of "aptitude upgrade" in order to discourage it. I thought they only documented and recommend "aptitude safe-upgrade" or "aptitude full-upgrade" these days. Therefore the above doesn't match best practices for aptitude. In order to get the "apt-get upgrade" behavior out of aptitude I think it is "aptitude --no-new-installs safe-upgrade". Having done "aptitude upgrade" I think the following "apt-get dist-upgrade" won't ever have any work to do. Or if it does then it is a deficiency of aptitude. 5. It looked to me to be more of a cargo cult science rather than real science. I think they were simply trying to cover all possibilities by doing both with the thinking of how could one go wrong if you used both? Bottom line is that I think people that prefer apt-get (like me) would say that only apt-get is necessary and will write the recipe to only use apt-get. People that prefer aptitude will say that only aptitude is necessary and will write the recipe to only use aptitude. I think that is fine. Friendly competition of features between the tools can be a win for the user. For the most part I expect either to be interchangeable with the other. I would like to see a two recipe solution where one uses apt-get and one uses aptitude. I think they would be equivalent to each other. Full disclosure is that I prefer apt-get over aptitude. Speed and performance is one reason since apt-get is a lot faster. However for people who like to manually shape the solution and have spent the time to learn the tool I can see aptitude being very good for them. I have not invested the time to learn aptitude's interactive interface. Using apt-get produces the same result of crafting solutions but in the different way of using different command line commands. It is six of one or a half dozen of the other. Bob
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