aptitude vs. apt-get

[Derek Broughton]

Christoph Bier wrote:

> Will H. Backman schrieb am 05.10.2005 20:58:
> 
>> Is it true that aptitude should be used instead of apt-get?
> 
> Although the other answers are true I still use apt-get most of the
> time. aptitude occasionally makes strange decisions on what to
> install and what to remove. Then it wants to install packages I
> don't want and I don't need (e.g. spamassassin, wine ...)

They're not that strange :-)  By default it installs all "Recommends" as
well as "Depends" dependencies.  That can be turned off either in
the /etc/apt/conf.d/ files or on the command line.

> and wants to remove packages I need and use (nearly) every day

That tends to be a holdover from having used apt-get to do the original
installations.  In any case, you can use "aptitude unmarkauto pgkname" to
prevent it.

In my case, when I first moved from Debian to Kubuntu, I installed kubuntu
on a clean system, then used "dpkg --get-selections" on the Debian system
and "dpkg --set-selections" on the kubuntu system, followed by "aptitude -f
install" to install all my existing packages - so I ended up with many
things marked as manually installed that should really be auto, so rather
the opposite situation to you.

> So, have an attentive look 
> at the packages aptitude wants to install/remove!

That's a good idea with apt-get too :-), but it's especially necessary when
first moving from apt-get to aptitude.
-- 
derek