On 2023-06-16 13:14, gene heskett wrote: > Has aptitude been tamed? > > I've stayed away from it now for years because its torn the system down with > its idea of dependencies, to doing a reinstall 4 times in the decade passed. > I do not trust it at all, been burned to the ground too many times. With > apt, I was able to remove cups-browsed all by itself with apt so the brother > factory drivers could actually run my pair of brother printers just now. I > have serious doubts aptitude would have allowed that without nuking 300 other > files too. Like the kernel thats running once. That is not an ooops but > nobody seemed to notice at the time. The arm version seems to be ok, but x86 > stuff? > > Cheers, Gene Heskett.
If anything gets even a tiny bit hairy, I work in aptitude. That said, I
disabled
"automatically fix broken packages before installing or removing" under
"dependency
handling" in options->preferences . I always review what exactly is being done
(in
those situations) by looking over what is expressed after hitting "g" and making
sure I'm happy with it.
I (personally) use this. It's extremely powerful if used correctly, but can be
tricky. Force a package installation by highlighting something and pressing
"+".
You can mark things manually installed with "m" (and auto-installed/removable
with
"M"). If things go south after one action, press "Control-u" to undo that.
Things
can get tangled here, but you always see what happens before you do it! You may
have to review suggested resolutions of things ("!" will apply the
recommendation,
sometimes this does NOTHING, which is a little counter-intuitive at first). Set
a package to be kept in the original state with ":", and force-hold to it's
current
version (and pin it there) with "=". Notice that ":" may still uninstall a
package
if it is automatically installed and nothing depends on it (anymore)!
I just tried to get apper working, and could not get it to ask for authorization
through polkit. That might be a trixie bug, a "I locked polkit down too tight"
bug, or a wayland bug. If you *really* want a gui, I'd at least try apper. I
wasn't willing to try synaptic (GTK dependencies and all).
You might be able to get your Xwayland token to root, but I don't recommend
running root GUI applications.
Best,
Antonio
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