Upgrade problem

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Mon, 2019-05-20 at 00:12 +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> As far as I know, the new name was introduced simply because "dist-upgrade" was a rather
> misleading name

That's definitively the reason for the name.

It's not really important if dist-upgrade and full-upgrade do exactly
the same or not. In practise one works as good as the other.

The "user-friendly" approach to replace several commands by a single
command most likely is the reason for becoming Ubuntu's official tool.

Instead of apt-foo, apt-bar, dpkg or helpers such a gdebi the user just
needs to run apt.

On Sun, 19 May 2019 17:36:05 -0400 (EDT), Robert Heller wrote:
> Arg "user-friendly"... There are different meanings for
> "user-friendly".  *I* don't want a pointy-clicky "user friendly"
> interface -- I do almost ALL of the updates of the various
> Ubuntu/Debian boxen from the command line, often using a *plain* xterm
> over a ssh connection.  I really don't need/want an application to
> demand the use of GUI to do things like display progesss meters or
> other "friendly* eye candy.

apt-get and Co. as well as apt allow to enable and disable exactkly the
same command line eye candy. From command line by the "-o" option and by
the configuration, using things such as APT::Color and
Dpkg::Progress-Fancy::Progress-Bg. Regarding this there is no difference
between using apt-get and Co. or apt.

You still could continue using *plain* xterm over a ssh connection to
run apt, it's not a GUI, it even doesn't enforce a ncurses interface.

Btw. I'm doing almost everything by command line, but with a way more
user-friendly terminal than xterm. I'm using ROXTerm. ROXTerm's user-
friendliness stand out due to usability, not due to an obtrusive anyoing
design, but indeed, ROXTerm supports mouse usage.

Note, ROXTerm is not discontinued, it's actively developed, see 
https://github.com/realh/roxterm/commits/master. It's a pity that Ubuntu
dropped it from universe.

As already explained, you could use apt in scripts, too. Several
commands are tricky for different reasons, especially if you write
scripts that should be portable for usage with different distros, "su"
and "sudo" come to mind. apt isn't an exception, the only exception is
the warning message.

The man pages of apt-get and Co. are still required for (expert) usage
of apt, since the only fishy thing about user-friendliness is the
documentation. The documentation shouldn't be to long to read, but also
contain all (expert) features, this is like walking a tightrope,
especially for a command under rapid progress.