what do you want to see in future apt versions ?

[Paul Smith]

On Thu, 2020-06-04 at 14:06 -0700, rikona wrote:
> On Thu, 04 Jun 2020 12:13:01 -0400
> Paul Smith <paul at mad-scientist.net> wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 2020-06-04 at 09:10 -0700, rikona wrote:
> > > The current word usage is confusing, and, yes, everyone can learn
> > > to use confusing commands, but why not make them less confusing.
> > > This comes up often on the list - that's a good clue that it is
> > > not clear.  
> > 
> > Changing documentation is straightforward.
> > 
> > Changing commands is hard.
> 
> How about installing an alias with each distro & update? Is that too
> hard to do? That way, both sides would be happy. :-) Do the super-
> users not have the talent to come up with an easy way? :-)

Installing an alias for what?  What would the alias be?  What if you
ran the "wrong" one, wouldn't it be confusing if they did the same
thing?  And if they didn't do the same thing, that means I have to
change all my scripting etc. for each new release... that's bogus.

And you'll get people all over the help forums using different
commands, adding notes saying "well you know it's really the same
command", "you should use so-and-so command", and on and on.  Consider
what we get just with "apt-get dist-upgrade" vs "apt dist-upgrade"!

IMO, "aliases for each distro" creates a bigger problem than we have
now, rather than making things better.


However I do agree that the help text and man pages for these commands
could be improved: "Distribution upgrade" is a pretty poor description.