Re: [BLUG] Apt-get vs Aptitude

Sidarth Dasari wrote:
> Ok im sorry if this has been asked repeatedly in the past, but I just
> wanted to get a simple explanation of the differences between these
> two package managers. Ive done done some googling myself and I've come
> across two basic answers. One is that they are just about the same and
> it doesn't matter which one to use. The other answer was that aptitude
> does a better job removing packages.
> Are there any other differences between these two? And if Aptitude is
> better at removing packages why don't more people use it?
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apt-get can do either "upgrade" or "dist-upgrade". The former will avoid
installing or removing packages and only upgrade packages already on the
system if possible. The latter (dist-upgrade) will also allow installing
new packages as depended on by new versions of other upgraded packages.
Neither will uninstall orphaned dependencies.

aptitude has "safe-upgrade" and "full-upgrade". Safe will upgrade as
many packages as it can, install new dependencies, and remove newly
orphaned dependencies so long as those orphans aren't marked "Manually
installed" in the local Apt cache. Apt does track if you installed a
package directly or if it was pulled in automatically to satisfy a
dependency. Full-upgrade will try to get every package to uptodate
status. If it can't do so cleanly, it will look at what packages will
break and make suggestions on how to resolve the situation.

The problem I have with aptitude is that while it's smarter, it's
sometimes /too/ smart. It sometimes gets stuck on an upgrade and wants
to remove something I don't want to lose. That's when I do apt-get
upgrade and let aptitude pick up the scraps. I could also use apt-get to
mark the package manually installed, but sometimes I don't want to do
that for some reason.

aptitude also rolls in the functionality you can get from apt-cache and
other apt tools. It's a multi-faceted beast. I think it's convenient to
need only one tool, but I like having my smaller tools. Each tool has a
unique purpose and a more direct manpage.

-Barry
-Barry
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