Re: package management begins to annoy me

On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 13:15:23 +0000, thveillon.debian (thveillon.debian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote:

Hi, just sharing a user experience with aptitude, which I use. You do
have a point about apparent simplicity regarding apt-get, most of the
time it just seems to "work", period. It is all the more true since many
users just see it through a gui, and synaptic is a nice tool.

But when running a system which is a mix of testing, sid and
experimental, plus a few debian-multimedia goodies thrown in, aptitude
performs better. In this situation I am really happy that aptitude is
showing me the nuts and bolts of the tricky dependencies resolutions,
giving me the opportunity to take the final decision (wrecking my system
or not ;-) ). I don't consider it's "verbosity" as being a problem.
In the same situation apt-get often just can't get through, and leaves
me with dpkg to manually install a few packages before apt-get works
again. Off course I am *not* overlooking the possibility that I am just
too dumb to get apt-get to work, but then the simplicity argument just
drops.

The main drawback I find in aptitude is the learning curve, to simply
use the cli search function in an efficient way the user has to go
through a lot of fine manual pages, with non idiot friendly patterns and
regex to remember. But at least it is still aptitude options when apt
would require the use of additional tools (like apt-cache). The ncurse
interface is a bit better, but lacks user-friendliness in many aspects.
I thing aptitude will effectively become the popular choice when
aptitude-gtk is ready, giving a lot of flexibility to the user from the
cli to the full-blown gui.

I was half way through composing a reply to this thread, so very similar
to the above from Tom, but definitely not as well written, that it seems
easier to say "me too". Aptitude from the command line gives so much
control that, IMHO of course, it really is worth the effort to learn at
least some of the less obvious search patterns and qualifiers.

Just my humble user experience.

Tom


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Bob Cox. Stoke Gifford, near Bristol, UK.
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