[ale] Your Go-To CLI Tools?

[Alex Carver]

One of the problems that aptitude had is that it would sometimes decide
on a scorched earth method and just uninstall and purge all sorts of
packages simply because a dependency to a specific package wasn't met
even though there was an alternate package meeting that dependency.
apt-get doesn't quite do that so it's harder to end up in a dependency
loop, not impossible but harder.

Where some people get into quagmires is when they are bridging two
distributions whether by source pinning or directly installing a .deb
that the APT system doesn't fully understand.  Brokenness abounds in
these edge cases.  I managed to get one system stuck that way precisely
because of source pinning.  I had a test machine that needed a library
not available in stable but it was available in testing.  So I pinned it
to testing.  When it came time for a base upgrade, the pinning caused
all sorts of chaos because other packages allowed themselves to upgrade
based on the pinned library version.  But rolling back the pin broke
those other packages which cascaded into an awful mess.  Took the better
part of a day to recover that.

I did upgrade five machines from squeeze to wheezy in the past year just
fine using apt-get.  None of those machines had pinned sources or
anything else unusual.  They were all pointing to squeeze and I just
edited the sources list, pointed everything to wheezy and let it fly.
My only hiccup with one machine was the initramfs not loading because
the build script didn't give lilo an updated config with an initramfs
load line.  I had to boot to an older kernel without initramfs and add
the line manually.  It was fine after that but that's not the fault of
apt-get, that was a package problem.

On 2014-11-06 09:34, JD wrote:
> I know that aptitude will try much harder for a solution to package dependency
> issues and provide options.  This is good for any mariadb user and I suppose for
> people who've been screwed over by the different JREs.
> 
> If apt-get were so good, then how do all those people get into "APT-Hell?" Self
> inflicted by installing .deb files directly?
> 
> BTW - I'm loving the discussions. Sharing different opinions lets others make
> more informed choices.
> 
> On 11/06/2014 12:08 PM, dev null zero two wrote:
>> While it may be true that it's broken in some places, debian now recommends
>> aptitude over apt-get on their wiki and in other places.
>>
>> On Thu, Nov 6, 2014 at 11:59 AM, Alex Carver <agcarver+ale at acarver.net
>> <mailto:agcarver+ale at acarver.net>> wrote:
>>
>>     On 2014-11-06 07:51, JD wrote:
>>
>>     > aptitude - Why to people still bother with apt-get? If you don't know aptitude,
>>     > you don't know what you are missing.
>>
>>     Because even Debian themselves says aptitude is broken in some respects?
>>      (It doesn't always handle an upgrade properly and can leave the system
>>     in an upgrade limbo).
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