On 25-06-17, Mark Fletcher wrote: > Hello the list! > > I have upgraded this weekend from Jessie to Stretch. All went, overall, > reasonably smoothly -- the documentation around releases is getting > better and better. I plan to write a full report of the upgrade and > share it here shortly. In the meantime I have one question. > > It seems like aptitude is falling out of favour in stretch, and apt as a > command line tool as opposed to the name for the general entire package > management system is being recommended these days. I've never been a > huge fan of apt-get (although to be fair that means little more than I > settled on aptitude [command-line version not ncurses version] and > learned its quirks a long time ago) and so I am, somewhat reluctantly, > making the switch to apt from aptitude. apt has a couple of features I > really like, but I do wish apt show made it easier to tell if a package > is installed -- you have to read a lot further down the info to find > out. > > My question is that since the upgrade chromium is held back from > upgrading, and in this new world I don't know how to find out why. In > aptitude I would have done aptitude why-not chromium and it would most > likely have told me something useful about its dependencies. How can I > get apt to do similar? Or what tool should I use? > > I'm aware that apt-cache depends chromium will tell me what it depends > on, but that doesn't tell me what is stopping it from being upgraded. > > sudo apt upgrade and sudo apt full-upgrade both just tell me chromium > has been kept back, but not why. > > sudo apt --fix-broken install finds nothing to do. > > Suggestions would be much appreciated. > > Mark >
In short, use aptitude for why and why-not. Closest thing apt-get and friends have would be apt-cache --important depends/rdepends. But, aptitude is much better suited for that task. And for all other tasks that involve advanced searching, as far as I could tell. As for apt itself, would not know exactly, I refuse to use tool with man page that treats me like an idiot, while not giving me anything new and important compared to apt-get and friends. But guess would be that it is apt --important depends/rdepends. And probably not more helpful than apt-cache variant.
