New Debian leader seeks more innovation within project (ITWire)

There's always many things to improve and fix, but I think we've been making continuous progress, although several of the questions below would have been better formulated as either bug reports or queries to the respective development teams. Several questions have already been covered, I'll try to address them anyway in case they have only been partially addressed.

> Quick questions:
> 1. Can APT and aptitude be used in same machine?

Yes, although there's metadata tracked by aptitude not visible to apt (or dpkg), which might make the latter perform unexpected actions, for example "Forbid version". Work is ongoing or will be to unify those states lower in the stack.

> 2. Is aptitude ready for Multiarch now?

Yes, although aptitude's resolver is in general too eager to propose solutions that remove packages instead of holding them, this affects not only multiarch-enabled systems though. I think there's work going on trying to address this.

> 3. Is Synaptic still maintained?

Yes, <http://ftp-master.metadata.debian.org/changelogs/main/s/s...>.

> 4. Why dpkg still recommends dselect and aptitude while doesn't mention APT at all?

No one filed a bug report for this before, and we didn't stop to think about it. I've fixed it now locally in my git tree anyway, will be included in dpkg 1.17.0.

> 5. Is dselect still relevant?

It's still maintained, and it still has its very loyal user base. It should probably not be used by new users, before it has received a UI facelift (but optional to not enrage current users).

> 6. Why APT makes hold/unhold feature almost invisible?

I don't think I understand the question, is this a documentation or implementation complaint?

> 7. How many people are aware of apt-mark?

If people are not aware of it, then it might be worth documenting it more prominently, for example in apt's package description, and referenced from apt's man pages, please file a bug report.

> 8. Why running apt-mark without arguments do not show hold/unhold commands?

File bug report?

> 9. Is delta update possible? [1]

Yes, as pointed out before, although it's on dpkg TODO to try to integrate it more tightly lower in the stack.

> 10. When something go wrong, can APT be less frightening? Fixing APT issue is really like a black magic.

In general, users should not need to fix stuff, of course there's packaging or upstream bugs, but those should usually be dealt with by reinstalling or upgrading to a fixed version, and usually never by needing to mess around with any of the package managers databases. So users would ideally file bugs to get packages fixed. Sometimes that might take too long or whatever, and that's one of the reasons dpkg is designed to allow the admin to fix up its internal state manually with common UNIX tools, but that has the danger that the user can easily mess up the system, more so from ill advised recipes coming from forums and similar...