APT the system vs. front-ends [ was Apt dependency hell ]

[Paul Lussier]

"Ben Scott" <dragonhawk at gmail.com> writes:

>>>   I thought apt-get, aptitude, synaptic, etc., were all just frontends
>>> to the "APT system"?
>>
>> They are all wrappers of dpkg more than anything, just like yum is a wrapper
>> for rpm.
>
>   Hmmm.  I had thought that APT (uppercase) was a subsystem of its own
> (libraries, calling conventions, files, data, etc.), and that apt-get,
> aptitude, etc., were basically just user interfaces to that subsystem.
>  I take it that's wrong?

>From the man apt(8)

  DESCRIPTION
         APT  is  a management system for software packages.  It is
         still under development; the snazzy front ends are not yet
         available.  In the meantime, please see apt-get(8).


apt-get, dselect, synaptic are all different front-ends which utilize
the underlying framework.  However, aptitude is more like
apt-get+dselect, where it's both a command-line & menu-driven system
in one depending upon the presence of command-line args.

There is new logic in aptitude that apt-get did not have.  There well
maybe logic from apt that made it into aptitude.  apt-get and aptitude
were written by completely different people (fwiw).

>From /usr/share/aptitude/README:

  What is this aptitude thing, anyway?

  aptitude is a featureful package manager for Debian GNU/Linux
  systems, based on the renowned apt package management
  infrastructure. aptitude provides the functionality of dselect and
  apt-get, as well as many additional features not found in either
  program.

So yes, both apt-get and aptitude use the "renowned apt package
management infrastructure", but that infrastructure doesn't
necessarilly provide all the logic required to deal with all
dependency issues or package manipulation options.

-- 
Seeya,
Paul
--
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