update-manager vs apt-get

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Thu, Jul 20, 2006 at 01:20:43AM +0200, Mario Vukelic wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-07-19 at 10:40 +0200, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > 
> > Yes, in fact, it does do something special.  It uses more sophisticated,
> > special-purpose algorithms to handle the upgrade correctly, and we fine-tune
> > them to ensure that the upgrade does the right thing.
> 
> Ok, that makes it "the simplest way for most users, especially if you
> are not an expert", as DapperUpgrades states. But does it do anything
> else that needs special manual intervention (above that mentioned on
> DapperUpgrades)?

That's not an easy question to answer, as it takes a different approach to
the upgrade.  It isnt' simply "apt-get dist-upgrade plus some other bits".
It's entirely possible that it gets certain cases right that dist-upgrade
doesn't, without our knowledge.  There are just too many possible
combinations to know.

> "more sophisticated, special-purpose algorithms ... and we fine-tune
> them to ensure that the upgrade does the right thing" sounds like
> something an expert user can achieve just as well with this equipment:
> DapperUpgrades, aptitude dist-upgrade, some knowledge about the package
> manager, diff, conffiles and text mode editors; common sense; dpkg
> --force-things

It certainly doesn't do anything that the user couldn't do manually, but the
idea is to do it automatically and intelligently without user intervention.

> I'm still interested in whether an upgrade via update-manager results in
> an in any way different upgraded configuration than applying the tools
> mentioned above. Or in other words, is it advisable even for experts, to
> use update-manager instead of CLI (aside from the time savings), even if
> they strongly prefer CLI, and why, if so?

Yes, it certainly can, and yes, it's advisable to use it instead of the
current command-line tools for the simple reason that it is better.

As I've said, it is entirely possible to write a command-line front end to
it (the code is explicitly designed to support this), and I would encourage
someone in the community to take up that challenge.

-- 
 - mdz