Ron Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> Maybe you don't care, and have gobs of disk space to burn, but _lots >> of people do care_, and aptitude does an elegant and painless job of >> satisfying this desire (unlike deborphan; I used it for a long time >> before aptitude was usable, and frankly, deborphan is an unreliable >> and cranky hack). > > Really? I've never had problems with deborphan. GtkOrphan is > really handy.
Yes. The problem with deborphan is that because it's run as a sort of after-the-fact cleanup task, it's lacking a rather crucial piece of information that aptitude has: which packages did the user specifically _ask_ to be installed. Without that info, you can't do a good job. When I used deborphan I had evolved a system of scripts which tried to maintain this information, but it was forever getting out of sync, and felt like a kludge. Switching to aptitude swept all that crap away; suddenly everything just _worked_. [The "intelligently resolve broken packages" functionality (in recent versions of aptitude) might take a while to get tuned to the point where it feels quite so painless, but I think ultimately it's a useful facility, especially for non-expert users.] -Miles -- "1971 pickup truck; will trade for guns" -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]