I have noticed the same thing. I very much prefer aptitude; I find the distinction between apt-cache, apt-get, and apt-mark to be terrible. But aptitude doesn't seem to get the same amount of developer attention as apt-get.
A few years ago aptitude was a bit ahead of apt-get in capability. I thought there was an initiative to make aptitude and apt-get use the same libraries for dependency management, but instead apt-get improved and aptitude stagnated. I think aptitude is dying, and it makes me sad. Richard On Wednesday, January 15, 2014 15:45:21 Michael Torrie wrote: > If any Debian experts could give some some advice I'd appreciate it. My > question is, am I using aptitude wrong? What should I do differently? > > My debian laptop is a bit behind on updates at the moment, but I want to > install certain packages should bring in dependent updates. I'll run the > rest of the updates later. I tried to use aptitude to bring in a > package called clearlooks-phenix-theme (a GTK3 that fits better with my > Mate GTK2 theme). Aptitude reported that there were unmet dependencies, > which isn't surprising as there are some major gnome updates waiting to > be installed and GTK3 got bumped a revision. However rather than > resolving the dependencies and discovering that dependent packages > needed to be updated, the only solution aptitude could offer involved > removing nearly 100 packages including GTK+ 2 and GTK+ 3! If I had > naively allowed aptitude to continue I'd be left with a completely > broken system. None of aptitude's other solutions involved anything > other than removing lots of packages either. > > When I went back to using apt-get, I was not surprised to see that it > resolved dependencies simply by upgrading a half dozen packages along > with the new package install and everything is happy. > > Needless to say this experience has not impressed me with aptitude's > lack of super cow powers. Seems like a dangerous tool, if the end user > naively clicked "yes" to aptitude's suggestions. Am I using aptitude > wrong? Or is apt-get still the only game in town? > > thanks, > Michael /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
