I have not yet found a downside to aptitude, but I found a huge upside back in August.I've recently started using aptitude from the console instead of apt-get for package management on my Woody systems. I find some of the features, like the ability to do a "--with-suggests", quite useful. It seems like Aptitude does a better job of handling dependencies as well.
Are there any pitfalls when using Aptitude to manage a system? For example, running
aptitude update && aptitude upgrade
instead of
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
Is Aptitude being pushed as the replacement for dselect, or perhaps as an eventual replacement for apt-get?
Thanks for any thoughts.
-- me.kirchhoff
I regularly did:
apt-get update apt-get dist-upgrade #(never "upgrade")
One day I was astonished to see that apt-get wanted to remove half my system:
---------------------------------
# apt-get -s dist-upgrade
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
Calculating Upgrade... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
acct adduser anacron apache at base-config binutils bonobo bsdmainutils
calamaris cdrecord console-common console-data console-tools cron
debconf-utils debhelper dhelp docbook-dsssl dpkg-dev dump exim fingerd
g77
g77-3.3 galeon-common galeon-nautilus gcc gcc-3.3 gdm gnome-doc-tools
gnome-gv gs gs-common info2www ipchains kernel-package
kernel-source-2.4.21
libgnomeprint-data libgnomeprint15 libpaper-utils libpaper1 libpaperg
lilo
locales logrotate lpr lvm-common lvm10 mailx man-db man2html mozilla
mozilla-browser mozilla-mailnews mozilla-psm multi-gnome-terminal
multi-gnome-terminal-doc nautilus netbase nntpcache pan ppp pppconfig
pppoe
pppoeconf quota setserial squid webmin webmin-apache webmin-core
webmin-inetd webmin-lilo webmin-lpadmin webmin-lvm webmin-ppp
webmin-quota
webmin-raid webmin-squid webmin-xinetd x-window-system
x-window-system-core
xcdroast xdm xfonts-100dpi xfonts-base xfonts-scalable xinetd xnest
xpdf-reader xpdf-utils xprt xprt-common xserver-common xserver-xfree86
The following NEW packages will be installed:
liblocale-gettext-perl libtext-charwidth-perl libtext-iconv-perl
libtext-wrapi18n-perl module-init-tools
The following packages have been kept back
debconf
1 packages upgraded, 5 newly installed, 96 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
----------------------
... so I installed aptitude and ran
aptitude dist-upgrade
Aptitude did the install and upgrade part but didn't want to remove 96 packages.
I've used aptitude for dist-upgrades ever since.
Incidentally, this is a very good argument against doing automatic, unattended dist-upgrades :)
-- "They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one: they promised to take our land, and they took it."
- Chief Red Cloud (Mahpiua Luta) of the Oglala Sioux
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