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

From : Edward Anderson <nilbus@nilbus.[redacted]>

Date : Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:57:47 -0500

Parent

I always use apt-get. After removing packages, it will sometimes tell
me that certain packages (dependencies) are no longer in use, and that
I should use apt-get autoremove to remove them. It seems to me that
this isn't exclusive to aptitude.

Edward

On Sunday, March 7, 2010, <imkilgor@ncsu.[redacted]> wrote:
>>  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
>