making deborphan obsolete?

[Mario Vukelic]

On Tue, 2006-04-11 at 21:59 -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:
> Mario Vukelic wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 2006-04-11 at 22:31 +0200, Lutzer wrote:
> >> But I'm not sure about the purpose of Aptitude. Is it a
> >> replacement for apt-get/cache or is the goal to provide a terminal
> >> based frontend to compete with e.g. Synaptic?
> > 
> > This is a misconception furthered by the fact that apt-get has been
> > around for a long time, and alternatives took some time to be developed.
> 
> Where's the misconception?  _Everything_ I've read says that aptitude is
> supposed to replace apt-get.

Sorry if that came across wrong. I didn't say -you- have a
misconception. Lutzer's question seemed to me to show a little
misunderstanding of what apt-get's purpose is/was, and what aptitude's
is. No that I read it again, I'm not so sure anymore what exactly I saw
there :)

> This is a man page that has been written
> after the fact (witness the fact that it even references aptitude). 
> apt-get is, after all, a front-end itself to dpkg, and I don't think
> aptitude _does_ use apt-get.

I'm of course too lazy to dig up old manpages, but I distinctly remember
to have read something to this extent (eventually, users will not
encounter apt-get) in apt-get documentation, long before aptitude was
around. It might have been in Debian Potato. The fact that they have
updated the manpage to include tools that are available in 2006 does not
change that.

aptitude does not use apt-get, but reread the manpage: "... other  tools
using  the  APT library"
              ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The manpage does not say that apt-get is "the back-end for other tools",
but "can be considered the user's back-end". I.e., the user can fall
back to it if nothing else is available. Note that /usr/bin/apt-get is
part of the apt package, and as such is guaranteed to be available
whenever apt is. I think that's what the maintainers want to point out:
it is always there, but don't use it if other stuff is available. (And
that's why the last Debian release recommended aptitude to dist-upgrade
instead of apt)

Also, apt-get is not a front-end to dpkg. They represent 2 different
classes of tools, one to manage packages, one to resolve dependencies.

cheers,
M