I used to use aptitude for most of the package manging activities, which mostly meant doing equivalent of apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade.
lately (few month) the aptitude became completely usuable: package screen: I only see few packages in package tree, e.g. the Installed packages branch should have a LOT of packages, however it has only 10 packages. upgrade screen (screen you get into when you press 'g'): there should be a list of new/held/removed/updated packages. however, there is nothing there, the screen is empty. it looks like it got worse gradually, e.g. long ago it worked very well, later on it started to put a huge number of packages on hold for no apparent reason (apt-get wouldn't show them as being on hold, pressing '+' changed the state to 'i' with no problems) and now it does not work at all. I didn't see any bugs related to these problems, is it possible that there is something wrong with my system/my using of aptitude or is nobody using it? TIA erik