making deborphan obsolete?

[Derek Broughton]

Mario Vukelic wrote:

> I'm of course too lazy to dig up old manpages, but I distinctly remember
> to have read something to this extent (eventually, users will not
> encounter apt-get) in apt-get documentation, long before aptitude was
> around. It might have been in Debian Potato. 

At that time, Debian developers were touting dselect as "the" advanced
package management tool.  Forgive me for thinking that _somebody_ was out
to lunch.  Fortunately, KDE already had kpackage.

> aptitude does not use apt-get, but reread the manpage: "... other  tools
> using  the  APT library"

But so does apt-get.  apt-get is still a high-level CLI, and the generally
recommended tool for installs.  If the designers had really never intended
it to be used directly, they should have put the word out to all the
documentation writers.

> Also, apt-get is not a front-end to dpkg.

It certainly is.

> They represent 2 different 
> classes of tools, one to manage packages, one to resolve dependencies.

ps will show you that whether you run apt-get or aptitude, or any of the GUI
tools, it's always dpkg that actually does the install.  apt is the
dependency resolver.
-- 
derek