[Gllug] Back-out plans on Debian/Redhat?

[Bruce Richardson]

On Sat, Mar 07, 2009 at 03:13:28PM +0000, John wrote:
> 
> > apt-get does everything that you need for package management, certainly
> > interms of tracking dependencies, but as long as people fixate on
> > aptitude, which mostly provides a very poorly designed console UI, there
> > is a danger of important features only being created in aptitude and not
> > in the underlying tool.  For some time, the ability to distinguish
> > between packages that were deliberately installed and those which were
> > installed automatically as dependencies was present only in aptitude.
> > If the community as a whole had adopted aptitude like sheep, this might
> > have stayed that way.  Thankfully, this was corrected.
> 
> But some people need a console UI, and dselect has a much worse
> user interface than aptitude. Any others you would recommend?

My objection isn't to people using aptitude as a package browser, it's
to recommending it as a replacement tool, *especially* when it's said
that 'aptitude install' should be run instead of 'apt-get install'
because it's better.  'aptitude install" *shouldn't* be better;
thankfully, it isn't, at least as far as conventional admin tasks are
concerned.

> 
> 
> > Don't be encouraging people to type 'aptitude install' when 'apt-get
> > install' is what they should be doing.  It's sloppy and invites bad
> > practice.
> 
> But again, this is what Debian's own docs recommend.
> 
> Apart from the duplicatation of features between apt-get and aptitude,
> what other problems do you see in using aptitude instead of apt-get?

The assumptions in your question are flawed.  Apt-get and aptitude are
not equivalents; aptitude uses apt-get and can act as a wrapper for it,
so you don't have duplication of features, you have a wrapper exposing
the functionality of the underlying tool.

This is precisely the kind of confusion that can be perpetrated by
encouraging the use of aptitude as a command-line replacement for
apt-get. One result is that features which should be in the core
tool end up in the wrapper.

It was not good that for a while aptitude was tracking package state
separately from the core apt package database.  For one thing,
inevitably some package management would happen without aptitude, some
with, so that that aptitude's state would be incomplete (giving aptitude
a tendency to auto-remove far more than it should).  That problem was
recognised and fixed but persisting in treating aptitude as an
equivalent is an invitation to repeat this error.

The core package management functionality is in the apt package;
aptitude can be removed with no side effects.  Do not confuse this
issue.  Learn how to use apt-get to perform the basic tasks even if you
would normally use aptitude as a friendlier way to get at that
functionality.  aptitude is a package browser that makes it easier to
search the archive (theoretically - the interface is a terrible mess),
it's not a CLI replacement for the core tools and I wish the developer
hadn't gone down the road of portraying it as such.

-- 
Bruce

I see a mouse.  Where?  There, on the stair.  And its clumsy wooden
footwear makes it easy to trap and kill.  -- Harry Hill
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