Brian Masinick
@stevesr0 When you’re running Sid, there can be a significant difference in packaging when you’re running different package tools.
You’ve only scratched the surface on this. The dpkg tool is the low level package tool, and technically even dpkg calls a few different dpkg routines, depending on what you do with it. Another old Debian packaging tool is dselect. I never liked it and rarely used it. Aptitude is another alternative, and of course, there is the graphical tool synaptic and gdebi in addition to the other tools mentioned.
Many of these different tools treat package updates differently. On a release, conservative, seldom changed system, this wouldn’t make much difference. On Sid, where things are constantly changing this makes a huge difference.
Rather than say anything else about these other tools, most of which would rarely even be thought of or used, let’s focus on apt and apt-get. The apt-get tool is a developer’s tool, so for some it may still be the preferred tool. The apt tool is a high level tool, intended to be used by a general audience. Right there, that tells you that most people should be using either apt or synaptic, end of discussion, so for our purposes that’s what I recommend.
Me? I’m an out of the ordinary user. Sometimes I’ll deliberately use different tools, just to see if they have similar or different behaviors, and I’m also looking for defects and for things that break. For me, if things do break, I’m prepared in 100% of those scenarios because I’ve already created off line alternatives and/or backups to whatever I’m using.
The reason I flatly recommend either apt or synaptic is that both of them are middle of the road, practical tools that will maintain any mainstream Debian-based distribution and they’ll certainly maintain software packages appropriate for antiX. Sid users can also utilize apt, though apt-get will potentially make additional, sometimes conflicting, packages available. If you want to explore those conflicts, using apt-get -f install, apt-get purge or apt-get remove, then that’s a good exercise for someone who already has a recent backup and is willing to experiment with packaging in order to do some learning and problem solving, but the only beginner that should do this is a beginner willing to reinstall, experience failures and practice testing and recovery techniques; for that kind of activity, it’s an excellent tool. It’s just not easy to understand or explain every possibility that may arise. Anything really nasty is capable of rendering a system unusable if it veers too far off course. Years ago even Sid was reasonable to handle.
Just a couple of years ago though I ran into one of these scenarios with Sid that was fixed only by reinstalling the entire system.
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Brian Masinick
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