Aptitude [was Re: [CLUE-Tech] root kit checker]

[David Anselmi]

David L. Willson wrote:
> Let me insert that updates are almost equally easy on Debiany systems,
> one example of which is KNOPPIX installed to the hard-drive.  Two
> commands to update them all...
>  'apt-get update'
>  'apt-get upgrade'
> 
> and Justin Case, you want to install something new...
>  'apt-get install something-new'

I've recently discovered aptitude, boy what a nice program.  The main 
advantage is that when you apt-get something, all the dependencies come 
along too.  When you un-apt-get it, the dependencies hang around until 
you find and remove them.

With aptitude, when you select something for install it auto-selects the 
dependencies but it marks them as auto selected.  And auto-selected 
packages are automatically removed when nothing else depends on them. 
It was really easy to remove ~50MB of cruft from a system by marking 
everything I didn't care for as auto-installed.  And from now on, 
aptitude takes care of it for me.

It also shows reverse depends, so if you're curious why you have libfoo, 
when you've never heard of foo and don't really want to have anything to 
do with it, it will tell you.

Like dselect, it probably isn't easy for Windows users to grok at first. 
  But if you're using Debian you should be using aptitude.

Dave