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

[John Edwards]

On Sat, Mar 07, 2009 at 02:49:03PM +0000, Bruce Richardson wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 07, 2009 at 02:41:07PM +0000, Chris wrote:
<snip>
>> The recommended system for maintaining Debian is Aptitude, because it is
>> better able to sort dependencies, and that should be run frequently to track
>> security updates, not left until the entire distribution is due for an
>> upgrade.
> 
> I really do question that.  I don't think much of the people who make
> this recommendation, even if they have gotten it into the policy guide.  

But the recommendation to use aptitude is in Debian's own Release
Notes, and has been for the past couple of releases.


> 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?


> 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?


-- 
#---------------------------------------------------------#
|    John Edwards   Email: john at cornerstonelinux.co.uk    |
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