Re: upgrade to Wheezy fails with aptitude

On Lu, 02 apr 12, 22:28:18, Lisi wrote:
On Monday 02 April 2012 22:15:08 Andrei POPESCU wrote:
As I understand it the latest recommendation is to use apt-get from
command line and aptitude interactively.

Ah! Do you not use aptitude at the command line? Is that what you are
saying?

Yes, I only use aptitude from command line for things such as

aptitude purge ~o

which are impossible to achieve with apt-get alone and not easy even if
you combine it with other tools.

I never use it any other way. I tend to forget that it has an ncurses
mode.

The interactive mode is very powerful once you understand how it works
and remember the keystrokes.

Which would explain why I thought that both apt and aptitude can be used for
day to day operations. In fact, I am sure that I saw that - but not that it
was the most recent utterance from on high, and from what you say, it wasn't.

aptitude can and is used for day to day operations by at least one user
(me :p ), but I also try to use the best tool for the job. For example:

$ time aptitude install base-files
Reading package lists...
Building dependency tree...
Reading state information...
Reading extended state information...
Initializing package states...
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (13: Permission denied)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), are you root?

real 0m3.162s
user 0m3.056s
sys 0m0.092s

$ time apt-get install base-files
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (13: Permission denied)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), are you root?

real 0m0.363s
user 0m0.004s
sys 0m0.000s

As you can see, aptitude takes 3 seconds just to tell me that I'm not
root and this is on a somewhat capable machine (Intel Dual Core
T2330@xxx GHz with 2 GB RAM), but I have it running all the time anyway.
On my PIII 500Mhz aptitude takes almost three times as long, while
apt-get doesn't have a noticeable (for me) increase.

Kind regards,
Andrei
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