aptitude vs. apt-get

[charlie derr]

Seth Hasani wrote:
> <quote who="Michael R. Head" on Wed, Oct 05, 2005 at 03:35:17PM EDT>
> 
>>On Wed, 2005-10-05 at 14:58 -0400, Will H. Backman wrote:
>>
>>>Is it true that aptitude should be used instead of apt-get?
>>
>>I've never personally used aptitude in 1 year of ubuntu use and 8 years
>>of debian use, though it seems like it has some nice benefits.
> 
> 
> The thing about using aptitude instead of apt-get is that aptitude "tracks"
> dependencies in such a way that it will uninstall un-needed dependencies for
> you after you uninstall the app needing them. For example, lets say you
> install something a package "myapp" that needs the library package "mylib".
> Both commands "apt-get install myapp" and "aptitude myapp" will bring in the
> dependency mylib automagically.

aptitude also keeps a log of what it installed (or removed) when (which is much superior to
apt-get not keeping a log)

> 
> But when you want to remove myapp and you run "apt-get remove myapp", only
> myapp will be removed and mylib will still be sitting on your hard drive
> taking up space without a purpose. Whereas, if you installed it with
> aptitude in the first place and you run "aptitude remove myapp", both myapp
> and mylib will be uninstall because aptitude is smart enough to *know* mylib
> is no longer needed.
> 
> Seth

that last part can also be a pain (to realize that you've just uninstalled a ton of stuff
simply because it was pulled as dependencies, when you really still want most
for whatever reason)

	be well,
		~c