[PLUG] Debian virgin preparing to take the plunge

Michael M. mcubed at slashmail.org
Fri Apr 27 00:59:42 UTC 2007


On Thu, 2007-04-26 at 12:51 -0700, Rogan Creswick wrote:
> On 4/26/07, Michael M. <mcubed at slashmail.org> wrote:
> >
> > One of the advantages of doing it this way is that aptitude (presuming
> > you use it) will keep track of everything you explicitly install from
> > the very beginning.  Packages that you don't explicitly install
> > (packages pulled in as dependencies) will then be removed automagically
> > when you remove the only thing it said packages depend on.  Just helps
> > keep your system leaner.
> 
> I keep meaning to use aptitude instead of apt-get, but I just can't
> retrain my fingers after 7+ years of debian.. is there any reason not
> to alias apt-get to aptitude? (iirc, aptitude supports most, if not
> all, of the apt-get command params).


Good question.  I can't recall anyone mentioning doing that, but I'm not
sure what kind of problems it might create.  You might search the
debian-user mailing list just to see if anyone's discussed that.  The
command-line options that are probably most frequently used seem to be
the same, but there are some options exclusive to apt-get and some to
aptitude.  So I guess it depends upon how you use apt-get; i.e., how
often (if at all) you use any of the options that are different or don't
exist in aptitude.

One thing you might want to do first is look through your installed
packages using aptitude's ncurses interface and make sure everything you
know you want to keep is marked as installed ("i") vs. automatically
installed ("i" "A"), just so aptitude doesn't try to remove something
you don't want it to.


-- 
Michael M. ++ Portland, OR ++ USA
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions
of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to
dream." --S. Jackson




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