Aptitude hates my programs

[zokudu]

Hello, *nix forum users,

I have an install of Debian "Squeeze" Testing right now. I recently upgraded it from a stable Lenny install. I have everything setup to work except Hibernate *grumble* fine. However I now have an issue of whenever I try to install a program with aptitude it attempts to uninstall tons of my programs such as gedit, totem and all my gnome games D:

Any idea why aptitude may be doing this? Might it be related to not having installed those packages with aptitude.

 

[joetekubi]

Strange,
Usually the apt-get tools don't want to uninstall programs when you try to install a new program. I either run "apt-get update", "apt-get upgrade" from the command line, or if I need more help and visibility, I run synaptic, a gui front end.

for any debian distro, I strongly advise using apt-get for almost all programs.

 

[sourceninja]

Aptitude should be no different then apt-get for installing. Except that in my experience it has better dependency resolution.

 

[Nothinman]

Any idea why aptitude may be doing this? Might it be related to not having installed those packages with aptitude.

It should tell you why it wants to do anything.

for any debian distro, I strongly advise using apt-get for almost all programs.

Higher level tools like aptitude, synaptic, dselect, etc are recommended over apt-get. Apt-get really was only written as a debugging tool in the beginning but became popular because no official front-end was ready in the beginning.

 

[zokudu]

So I figured out the issue. After my upgrade from Stable to Testing I had a couple broken packages that I didn't know how to fix using aptitude at the time so I fixed the broken packages with Synaptic.

Turns out aptitude will attempt to uninstall any packages installed through synaptic because it views it as unessicary software. I reinstalled the packages using aptitude and everything is working fine. Also this goes both ways apparently synaptic will attempt to remove any packages installed by aptitude as well.

 

[Nothinman]

So I figured out the issue. After my upgrade from Stable to Testing I had a couple broken packages that I didn't know how to fix using aptitude at the time so I fixed the broken packages with Synaptic.

Turns out aptitude will attempt to uninstall any packages installed through synaptic because it views it as unessicary software. I reinstalled the packages using aptitude and everything is working fine. Also this goes both ways apparently synaptic will attempt to remove any packages installed by aptitude as well.

It's not quite that cut and dry. They both use the same backend database and at least aptitude will try to trim unnecessary packages. It selects them by those that were automatically installed and have no more reverse dependencies. That can be disabled, but I wouldn't recommend it. Although I never touch Synaptic so I'm not 100% sure how it handles that stuff.

 

[VinDSL]

I either run "apt-get update", "apt-get upgrade" from the command line, or if I need more help and visibility, I run synaptic, a gui front end.[...]

Aptitude has a nice gui package manager too, but you (usually) need to install it.

For example: I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 as my primary desktop.

Ubu 10.04 includes an ancient, non-gui version of Aptitude. However...

If you install Aptitude-Gtk, this is what you'll get:

 

[Colt45]

You probably removed something from a meta-package.

apt has an odd bit how if you remove part of a meta package, it very much dislikes.

relatedish. http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=39045

 

[zokudu]

You probably removed something from a meta-package.

apt has an odd bit how if you remove part of a meta package, it very much dislikes.

relatedish. http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=39045

I had assumed it was something like this that occurred when I used Synaptic to fix the broken packages and somehow a dependency got disassociated within aptitude. Its fixed now though so I should be good.

 

[Nothinman]

I had assumed it was something like this that occurred when I used Synaptic to fix the broken packages and somehow a dependency got disassociated within aptitude. Its fixed now though so I should be good.

Dependencies are in the packages themselves. The various package manager front-ends just use slightly different methods for dependency resolution and determining which packages are necessary.