On Thu 23 Feb 2017 at 08:21:43 (-0500), Gene Heskett wrote: > On Thursday 23 February 2017 06:10:44 to...@tuxteam.de wrote: > > > On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 10:58:49AM +0000, Lisi Reisz wrote: > > > On Wednesday 22 February 2017 17:32:46 Richard Owlett wrote: > > > > Learn to love apt-get. I does some things more conveniently than a > > > > GUI can. YMMV ;! > > > > > > aptitude is great on the command line. And does some things (but > > > not all) more conveniently than apt-get. Besides, it is NOT a GUI > > > application. It can be run as a TUI. </plug> > > > > Most definitely. I use both: for search and show, I love aptitude > > (perhaps some familiarity factor). For install/remove I use apt-get: > > its more simple-minded resolution algorithm is essential to cope > > with the Frankendebian horror shows I tend to throw at it (aptitude > > tends to ponder for a while and proposes to rip out 3/4 of that > > mess :-) > > Unfortunately, for me aptitude has elected to rip out something like 272 > packages too many times, some of which were the heart of the os. I let > it do it once on a machine I could afford to lose. I had to reinstall. > Its caused me to do 3 re-installs, so I might look at what it says, but > then I reboot the machine from another terminal because one of those > re-installs was caused by a simple q for quit, but it just had to "fix" > things before it would quit. By the time I could get to the hdwe reset > button it was too late and after the re-install another day or so > getting all my data restored via my amanda backups. The point is that > aptitude did NOT show me what it was about to do until it was doing it. > > So I am very cautious about telling aptitude to do _anything_ that would > cause a disk write other that a refresh from the servers.
Yes, Gene, we are well aware that aptitude, like network-manager, "usually doesn't work", and that the partitioner cannot be bypassed in the debian-installer, and that xterm is unusable, and that mutt should be replaced by a more modern intelligent MUA. Less than a year ago, you maintained that aptitude could only be run in curses and only as root, but were running it for 18 years in a misconfigured terminal that left stale text on the screen so that you had difficulty discerning its actions and intentions. While trying to remove/upgrade an entire architecture (amd64) that you regretted having installed, you posted that aptitude was displaying a long list of packages marked "id" (installed packages for removal). You said that you didn't understand that list because you hadn't got a reference manual. Advised to take a closer look, and to reset some in the list to "ii" and prevent their removal, you said that your methodology was to just let it rip and see what happens. A few days later, you were adamant that typing "q" at some point had made aptitude remove half your system, and you seemed surprised that there was some disbelief here. Cheers, David.
