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Comment by amluto | Hacker News Reader

My M.O. is:

  # apt-get update
  # aptitude full-upgrade
  # apt-get autoremove

Because as far as I can tell, apt-get sometimes fails to actually update things, whereas aptitude can't autoremove. I'm sure there's a better way.

This is my major gripe with the dpkg ecosystem. There are (AFAICT) multiple different tools to build dpgks and multiple different tools for updating your system, and none of them are adequately documented nor support all use cases.

The Fedora ecosystem is better in this regard. Want to build an rpm? rpmbuild is the only answer. Want to update the system? Use dnf. (Sadly, there's now also PackageKit, and it's not quite isomorphic to dnf.)

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AFAIK, the only supported way to build a deb is using dpkg-buildpackage, and all the others just wrap it (unless we're talking about alien, but that's not really "supported" going any direction).

Updating your system is all the same backend, and the Debian-alikes try to tell you to only use one tool for cmdline (apt, now, which just takes the same args as all the various apt-FOO commands did, all of which still work), and one for the GUI (Synaptic, or wrappers around it, unless Ubuntu Software Center has mutated a lot since I last looked).

IIRC they made a big deal about not installing aptitude (a popular alternate text UI for apt-based systems) by default on Ubuntu _because_ they wanted to standardize and fix any deficits, rather than working around them.

> they wanted to standardize and fix any deficits, rather than working around them.

That would work great if would they would take bugs reports seriously. In practice, with Canonical I file a bug and ninety days later get an automated message that the bug was closed due to inactivity.

That's an unfortunate pendulum swing cleaning up from their problem of yester-year - namely, bugs sitting around _forever_ without any comment.

I noticed they changed that policy when I started getting comments on years-old bugs of closed-obsolete. If they're now 90d expiring bugs, I'd _guess_ there's a bit that can be set for your account of whether you're a customer paying for support, and that their support staff have a queue filter that prioritizes those, and the rest get expired if nobody comments.

> apt-get autoremove

You should be doing:

    apt-get autoremove --purge

Otherwise you'll be leaving a lot of clutter around (obsolete configuration files).

apt-get update won't do anything beyond download the latest view of the repository.

you want:

apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade && apt-get autoremove

Aptitudes full-upgrade is synonymous with dist-upgrade.

Others wrote "apt-get dist-upgrade" in sibling comments, which should do the trick. If you want to build packages for multiple managers, fpm is a nice front-end for some of them: https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm

I use FPM all the time, but it is not a 'nice' way to package things, it's an 'easy' way to package things ;)

> apt-get autoremove

This is not going to autoremove kernels unless you modify the default preferences in /etc/apt/. For added benefit you should probably add --purge to your autoremove command.

apt-get dist-upgrade is what you nerd to use to upgrade all packages... Don't blame apt-get for your lack of knowledge on how it works

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