On Fri, 16 Jun 2023 23:03:59 -0400 <pa...@quillandmouse.com> wrote:
> > Please forgive my ignorance. But from what I've heard, apt and apt-get > manage packages differently, and aptitude does it differently as well. > Why isn't there a ONE WAY for packages to be managed? You'd think this > would a high priority for the Debian team. If the answer is, "We don't > want to break stuff from long ago", why not just deprecate things over > time? > > And why hasn't anyone made a Wayland-native port of Synaptic? Is it > planned? If not, why not? > As far as I know, apt is pretty much apt-get with a few extra bells and whistles, such as automatic clearing of the cache. Aptitude is different in that it tries harder to resolve difficult dependency situations, and generally does better i.e. it will sometimes produce a solution where apt-get will give up and leave half the packages unchanged. The cost is time, which increases sharply as the number of packages to be upgraded rises. I don't generally use it with sid, which gets a lot of upgrades, often three or four hundred at a time after only a few days. I did once leave aptitude running all night, and it still hadn't found an answer by morning. This is when, as I replied to Greg, I'd use synaptic to pick off as many easy upgrades as possible, until I got to the point where nothing else would go, and I'd have to wait for other upgraded packages to become available. -- Joe
