Aptitude included in Maverick by default

[Arand Nash]

On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 2:36 AM, Paul Smith <paul at mad-scientist.net> wrote:
> On Sat, 2010-06-12 at 08:40 +1000, Chris Jones wrote:
>> We already have apt-get, dpkg and gdebi. And between the 3 of those,
>> all bases are already covered.
>
> That's actually not so, I don't believe.  The only one of these three
> that is in any way competitive with aptitude is apt-get.
>
> And, aptitude has an advantage over vanilla apt-get in that it
> "remembers" the difference between packages you have installed directly,
> and those which were installed by the system in order to satisfy
> dependencies.  If you later remove the packages that were installed
> directly, then aptitude can also remove the other packages that were
> installed to satisfy prerequisites (as long as nothing else is using
> them, of course).
> <snip>
> Anyway, an unpacked aptitude package is less than 5M (aptitude itself is
> just 2.2M).

That's actually not so, I don't believe. Both apt-get and aptitude
does marking of auto-installed. It's just that you need to run apt-get
autoremove separately.
Aptitude + tasksel (dependency) is, in context, very big.

I do agree that aptitude is much superior, though not in those ways.

- arand