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Comment by miken123 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, until you do an upgrade:

"The upgrade process for some previous releases recommended the use of aptitude for the upgrade. This tool is not recommended for upgrades from wheezy to jessie."

See https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/c...

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Debian's zigzagging between package management frontends (dselect, apt-*, aptitude, dpkg, now apt?, … all in use in parallel) is incredibly frustrating. Pacman e.g. is so much easier to use because everything's in one well-structured command.

It probably reflects the classic problem of developer turnover in OSS projects and the resulting approach to technical debt. Old developers fade away, young guns come through (often still in academia), "this code is all crap, let's chuck it out and build something better, how hard can it be?"...

Well, just use apt(8):

apt install - Install packages

apt remove - Remove packages

apt upgrade - Upgrade packages without removing

apt full-upgrade - Upgrade packages, allowing removals

apt update - Refresh sources

apt show - Show a package

apt list - List packages, you can filter by stuff like --installed or --upgradable

1. "Just use $newtool" has been Debian's spiel for every past release, and every time it's a different one.

2. Why full-upgrade and not dist-upgrade like in all the other debian package managers? Would that little bit of internal consistency really have hurt?

3. Still does not seem to cover all use cases.

I don't know what you mean. dselect is like 2000 era, and was replaced by "aptitude" at least 15 years ago. "apt" has been around since the beginning and still works just fine. The fact that "aptitude" has some overlap with "apt" is a detail--its real strength is that its curses ui (which was a massive improvement over dselect).

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