Lorin - automatix site:lists.ubuntu.com

[Tommy Trussell]

On 2/3/07, John L Fjellstad <john-ubuntu at fjellstad.org> wrote:
> "Dennis Castanos" <dennismouille at hotmail.com> writes:
>
> > Thanks Lorin  -  that was great
> > I'll take the time to learn how to do it myself.
> > Is it ok to use update with aptitude, install with aptitude with a
> > fresh Edgy install?
>
> I only use aptitude for everything (upgraded from Dapper to Edgy,
> keeping it updated, no upgrade-manager or whatever), and haven't seen
> any problems at all.

For someone comfortable with the command line, aptitude has some real
advantages over synaptic. It's also a bit easier for managing
dependencies than apt alone. For example, I believe if you've used it
to install new packages, when you remove them it will also remember to
remove any dependent "orphan" packages. (If you've used another
package manager it won't automatically find the "orphans.") In
Synaptic you can search for orphan packages as a separate step.

Personally I don't like aptitude's text-based (curses) package browser
interface -- I find its navigation commands confusing. There may be an
X-based GUI for aptitude but I haven't used one. But as a straight
replacement for the apt commands aptitude is quite nice.