mixin apt and aptitude

[Keith]

On 1/10/23 5:16 AM, Oliver Grawert wrote:
> hi,
> Am Montag, dem 09.01.2023 um 18:13 -0500 schrieb Jeffrey Walton:
>> On Mon, Jan 9, 2023 at 2:18 AM robert rottermann <robert at redcor.ch>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> I once did read, that one should not mix the usage of apt and
>>> aptitude to
>>> maintain a server.
>>>
>>> Is this (still) true?
>>
>> One other comment that may be noteworthy... Apt is Debian's official
>> package manager. Aptitude is ncurses-based command line front end to
>> Apt.
>>
> 
> i'm pretty sure it is not a frontend to apt but, in fact to dpkg
> 
> despite using some functions from libapt-pkg to talk to dpkg, it uses
> its own databases and resolution mechanisms ...
> 
> as keith said above, aptitude is in "maintenance mode" while apt gets
> constantly developed and sees regular changes. eventually this will
> mean that aptitude will get out of sync with apt features and behavior
> (unless someone picks up development again to get them back in sync),
> which is why you should use it with a lot of care if you use them both
> alongside ...
> 
> the recent changes to make apt default to phased updates to protect
> users from breakage are a good example here.

Here's one such current example:

https://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-archive/phased-updates.html
> Package              Version       (signer) Update % Rate Increase  Errors     Days > gnome-remote-desktop 42.7-0ubuntu1 (jbicha) 0% of users (was 70%) 
11f28b 448eb0 6

Gnome-remote-desktop package has been held for around a week and seems 
it's because there were errors encountered after rolling out to some 
systems. So phased updates have prevented my system from upgrading a 
software package that is known to be causing issue(s) \o/  Now what 
issue(s) I don't know because to see the Errors you have to login to 
errors.ubuntu.com and be part of a group that can view them. But 
stopping the deployment of what was found to be a buggy upgrade is 
exactly what the policy of phased updates is for. Circumventing it just 
doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

> while apt holds back potentially broken packages until the phasing is
> fully done (or the packages are pulled back after a detected breakage),
> aptitudes safe-uograde will completely circumvent that new behavior and
> will just install the intentionally held back packages (packages that
> would normally only be fully rolled out to you after a portion of users
> got them first and did not report any problemns)
> 

-- 
Keith