2007 Feb 14 - Wed

Aptitude vs apt-get vs dselect

I have tried to use dselect on occasion. I thought it was just me who couldn't figure out how to deal with it. I guess that is a common ailment around users. I see now on an old debian-users mail list, dselect is really not recommended for much of anything.

As such, I have been using the likes of apt-get, apt-key, and apt-file for my package management. Today, I see that even apt-get is old and gray. The new kid on the block is 'aptitude' for Debian package management. From a message by Joey Hess on a another Debian User List entry, I reprint the following reasons for using Aptitude:

Seven reasons why you should be using aptitude instead of apt-get.

1. aptitude can look just like apt-get

   If you run 'aptitude update' or 'aptitude upgrade' or 'aptitude
   install', it looks and works just like apt-get, with a few enhancements.
   So there is no learning curve.

2. aptitude sanely handles recommends

   A long-standing failure of apt-get has been its lack of support for
   the Recommends relationship. Which is a problem because many packages
   in Debian rely on Recommends to pull in software that the average user
   generally uses with the package. This is a not uncommon cause of
   trouble, even though apt-get recently became able to at least mention
   recommended packages, it's easy to miss its warnings.

   Aptitude supports Recommends by default, and can be confgigured to
   support Suggests too. It even supports installing recommended packages
   when used in command-line mode.

3. aptitude tracks automatically installed packages

   Stop worrying about pruning unused libraries and support packages from
   your system. If you use aptitude to install everything, it will keep
   track of what packages are pulled in by dependencies alone, and remove
   those packages when they are no longer needed.

4. use aptitude as a normal user and avoid hosing your system

   Maybe you didn't know that you can run aptitude in gui mode as a regular
   user. Make any changes you'd like to try out. If you get into a real
   mess, you can hit 'q' and exit, your changes will not be saved.
   (aptitude also lets you use ctrl-u to undo changes). Since it's running
   as a normal user, you cannot hose your system until you tell aptitude to
   do something, at which point it will prompt you for your root password.

5. aptitude has a powerful UI and searching capabilities

   Between aptitude's categorical browser and its great support for
   mutt-style filtering and searching of packages by name, description,
   maintainer, dependencies, etc, you should be able to find packages
   faster than ever before using aptitude.

6. aptitude makes it easy to keep track of obsolete software

   If Debian stops distributing a package, apt will leave it on your system
   indefinitly, with no warnings, and no upgrades. Aptitude lists such
   packages in its "Obsolete and Locally Created Packages" section, so you
   can be informed of the problem and do something about it.

7. aptitude has an interface to the Debian task system

   Aptitude lets you use Debian's task system as it was designed to be
   used. You can browse the available tasks, select a task for install, and
   then dig into it and de-select parts of the task that you don't want.
   apt-get has no support for tasks, and aptitude is better even than
   special purpose tools like tasksel.

Makes sense to me. I'll give it a try.