On Wed 28 Jun 2017 at 22:19:18 +0900, Mark Fletcher wrote: > On Sun, Jun 25, 2017 at 11:18:46AM +0200, Dejan Jocic wrote: > > > > 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. > > > > Hmmm. So we end up using apt-get for major version upgrades (according > to the recommendations of the release notes), apt most of the time > (according to the recommendation of all the tools, including apt-get, > when the slightest thing goes wrong), and aptitude when neither apt-get > or apt have a good way to do something? Seems like this area of Debian > could use a cleanup. > > Thanks for the reply though.
Dejan Jocic makes a fair point contasting the search aspects of aptitude and apt-cache and questions whether apt provides anything significantly more than apt-get. I think you are reading too much into his reply. For example, I suspect aptitude would handle a major version upgrade just as well as apt-get. No doubt it has been done successfully; day-to-day upgrades too. I do not know where apt fits into this picture; it provides fluffiness, perhaps. What would a cleanup involve?
