Aptitude included in Maverick by default

[Paul Smith]

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).

Aptitude also has a better "search" capability than apt-get.

Personally I always use "aptitude install xyzzy" whenever anyone
suggests using "apt-get install xyzzy".


Anyway, an unpacked aptitude package is less than 5M (aptitude itself is
just 2.2M).