Re: LUG: Question about installing updates in Ubuntu - Sun, 07 Mar 2010 23:15:49 -0500

Subject : Re: LUG: Question about installing updates in Ubuntu

From : imkilgor@ncsu.[redacted]

Date : Sun, 07 Mar 2010 23:15:49 -0500

> I have always been using apt-get because it's the
> command that everyone seems to use throughout the Ubuntu forums and wiki
> pages.

It's a hard habit to break. There's nothing seriously wrong with it, but
aptitude is better at its job and apt-get confers no advantages over the
former (except having a name which I admit I still prefer..)

> Is there really such a downfall to using apt-get and aptitude
> interchangeably?

No, you just have to be cautious (IOW, look at the actions the tool tells
you it will perform before pressing 'Y' :).

The issue is that aptitude tries to differentiate between
manually-installed packages (eg, "aptitude install vim") and packages
pulled in automatically as dependencies, Recommends, or Suggests (eg,
vim-common). When it notices that a package which was installed as a
dependency is no longer depended upon by any manually-installed packages
(orphaned), it will attempt to remove it. This cruft-reduction is
generally desirable and one of aptitude's improvements over apt-get.

For quite a while though, aptitude would assume that packages installed
with apt-get were "automatically installed" (installed as dependencies),
and would attempt to remove them as soon as it was run, unless something
was installed that depended on one of these packages, or they were
specifically marked as manually installed (eg, with 'aptitude keep-all').
This caused some ruckus after aptitude became Debian's "recommended" apt
frontend.

I think that some time before or around the release of Lenny (If memory
serves- I'm failing to find the bug report) this was fixed. Sorry to
suggest earlier that it wasn't; I was remembering old behaviour.

I'm not qualified to answer your other question, but from a peek at the
source it seems that Synaptic is also an interface to APT (so at the same
level as apt-get and aptitude, not a wrapper around either (with some code
duplication from both)).
--
ik

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Re: LUG: Question about installing updates in Ubuntu