what do you want to see in future apt versions ?

[rikona]

On Thu, 04 Jun 2020 18:16:19 -0400
Paul Smith <paul at mad-scientist.net> wrote:

> 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?  

How about my 2 suggestions to do the main functions of the GUI?

> What if you
> ran the "wrong" one, wouldn't it be confusing if they did the same
> thing?  

If they are VERRRY clear it would be less confusing. And, yes, the
aliases WOULD do some of the same things - that's the idea of an alias. 

> 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.

All the original stuff would ALSO still be there - you don't need to
change anything. :-)

> 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"!

True - whatever you do will always confuse somebody. :-)

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

AIUI, the new version command has to include different info, and, yes,
that would be messy. But it would seem that the ALIAS would not need to
be changed unless the underlying commands are different.
 
> However I do agree that the help text and man pages for these commands
> could be improved: "Distribution upgrade" is a pretty poor
> description.

Agreed... :-)