In <aanlktins6p5oi2fg+njtabcoyzkuskayk4pytftsy...@mail.gmail.com>, pt3...@gmail.com wrote: >I'm a Debian Squeeze new user and have some basic questions about >Debian package tools. > >Is it true I should avoid APT and use some other frontend or, better, >dpkg directly?
Absolutely not, on both counts. With the Squeeze release, apt-get reclaims
the title of most recommended package management tool.[1] Using dpkg directly
is only for masochists, similar (but a little less useful) than using rpm
directly on Fedora / OpenSUSE.
>I tried aptitude, but I don't like ncurses-based tools. I prefer the
>classic command line if possible.
Well, aptitude can be used as a command-line tool, which is how I use it most.
I'm still a big fan of it over apt-get due to the powerful search terms. I
find the NCurses interface indispensable when dealing with conflicts that apt-
get / aptitude resolve poorly by default. This happens most often on a mixed
system like mine, but it can happen with a pure stable system as well.
>How can I obtain the list of sources currently used by installed packages?
Here's my recipe:
{ aptitude search '~i' --disable-columns -F '%s' | sort -u | grep '/' |
sed 's/\([[:alpha:]-]\+\)\/.*/\1/g'; echo main; } |
sort -u
The vrms package can also be quite informative here.
>I'm not sure if the following procedure is right for staying up to date:
>apt-get update; apt-get upgrade; apt-get autoremove --purge; apt-get
>autoclean Am I missing something else?
(apt-get update; apt-get upgrade) keeps you up to date.
(apt-get autoremove --purge; apt-get autoclean) cleans up cruft.
I let /etc/cron.daily/apt handle running autoclean and update for me. It even
runs a upgrade -d. I use aptitude, so autoremove is done by default with each
package runs that modifies the package database. I have my own cronjob that
runs (aptitude '~U') to let me know when an upgrade is needed. I've talked to
others that have been using unattended-upgrade in combination with
/etc/cron.daily/apt to handle even the upgrade part of maintaining a statble
system.
[1] Basically, by properly (re-)implementing aptitude's handling of markauto,
unmarkauto, Recommends-Important, Suggests-Important, Keep-Recommends, and
Keep-Suggests, etc.
--
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