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aptitude !aptitude !Posted Nov 8, 2007 10:00 UTC (Thu) by xav (guest, #18536)Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to (some) development distributions
After having trying Fedora and Ubuntu, I got back to Debian/sid (in fact I never erased the partition). Even in unstable form, I find debian extremely resilient to bad packages, and aptitude is the software I miss everywhere else. Aptitude marks all dependencies of a package you install as "automatically installed", which means if you uninstall the package, all those unused dependencies will be uninstalled too. Its conflict resolution system is far more advanced too. All in all, aptitude makes apt-get (and even more yum/rpm) look like a primitive toy in comparison. Sure, Ubuntu has aptitude, but it can't really be used here: their update tool has some knowledge needed to do some cleanup on each version update, so in a sense they perverted the dependency system by adding parallel information somewhere else. Try aptitude for a while, and you'll never get back to something else ...
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aptitude ! Posted Nov 8, 2007 21:13 UTC (Thu) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link] I use aptitude for everything on Ubuntu, and am beginning to like it. I'm not sure why 'it can't be used on Ubuntu' - you can avoid update-manager entirely even for dist-upgrades if you are confident you can fix breakages, but perhaps you could explain what you meant here.
aptitude ! Posted Nov 8, 2007 21:20 UTC (Thu) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link] FWIW, the latest apt suite handles the auto-installed tracking directly. But yes, aptitude rocks. If you tried it a few years ago, and were frustrated by its tendency to try to remove 30% of your packages so it could upgrade one library, try it again: its much much better.
aptitude ! Posted Nov 9, 2007 20:41 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Yes,apt-get autoremove works fairly well for removing unwanted packages which were automatically installed. I don't feel so comfortable with aptitude, with its endless lists of packages; for browsing packages I prefer synaptic, even if it's a bit slow, or plain apt-cache.
aptitude ! Posted Nov 12, 2007 22:01 UTC (Mon) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link] Agreed, the functionality is leaps and bounds better than it used to be. Unfortunately the user interface is still terrible.
aptitude ! Posted Nov 9, 2007 15:35 UTC (Fri) by spotter (subscriber, #12199) [Link] I've been using aptitude on ubuntu since warty. Have upgraded my machine from warty to hardy (yes, laptop runs hardy) via aptitude since then. While I've had issues following ubuntu development, its usually quickly fixable by jumping into IRC for a few minutes as I'm usually not the only to have the problem.
aptitude ! Posted Nov 9, 2007 15:49 UTC (Fri) by xav (guest, #18536) [Link] I've had some problems at distribution upgrade (from 6.10 to 7.04 IIRC) with aptitude, and have been told that those upgrades *have* to be made with the upgrade_manager, because it does more things than simply upgrade. Effectively, on another laptop using the recommended tool the upgrade process did a big cleaning of some packages and installed some more. Sorry, I can't remember which ones.
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