Debian User Forums

http://www.milliways.fr/cat/summer-of-code/

Daniel Burrows is planning to merge the Gtk+ interface into the main branch in September and packages may appear into Experimental.

I doubt that I'll ever use it in place of the command line, but if it gets to Experimental during the freeze, it will give me something interesting to play around with.

I just noticed that today also...

I am waiting for someone to make me some debs so I can try it out. Maybe I will tell katofied he needs to make me some debs.

Maybe I will tell katofied he needs to make me some debs.

Send him a PM so he's sure to see it!

And tell him to quit sounding off and get on with it.

maybe somebody would like to show him up and create some debs of aptitude-gtk before he gets a chance.....?????

Frankly, I'll stay with command line instructions. Yes, I use Synaptic occasionally to look at packages but I don't trust GUIs for anything major.

There is an element of self preservation here. On occasion I have torpedoed X and been forced to fix it from a terminal. At that point a GUI is useless; one simply has to use CLI or re-install. Keeping familiar with some basics can be really useful in the crunch.

That is a very interesting project.

Synaptic tabs any available package info under the package name. Search terms in Aptitude don't equate to that and the package site is comparatively slow and gangly.

I still use Synaptic for reference.

It would be a powerful addition to the Debian OS if the aptitude GUI equaled the Synaptic GUI.

It would be a powerful addition to the Debian OS if the aptitude GUI equaled the Synaptic GUI.

If it "equals" Synaptic, it will be a dead loss. Presumably, it is intended to make Synaptic completely superfluous, which, IMO, it already is.

The point is to provide a non-garbage package manager for people who have to have a GUI.

rickh wrote:

It would be a powerful addition to the Debian OS if the aptitude GUI equaled the Synaptic GUI.

If it "equals" Synaptic, it will be a dead loss. Presumably, it is intended to make Synaptic completely superfluous, which, IMO, it already is.

The point is to provide a non-garbage package manager for people who have to have a GUI.

I am addressing a GUI reference ability.

Since GUI oriented users may not be anointed as RDU's, I understand some might consider my point irrelevant.

It would be a good thing if the GUI obtains the rickh certificate of authenticity, so long as it can reference package information as well as Synaptic.

P.S. Just as Debian recommends Aptitude, Gnome, the default desktop of Debian, recommends Synaptic. It might be the better manager as far as GUI's go.

This is great I think. Not great for me, because I like the cli, but great for aptitude in general. Aptitude needs more fans! It really is the bomb. I haven't had a package misshap since I started using it a few months ago.

Ook wrote:

rickh wrote:

It would be a powerful addition to the Debian OS if the aptitude GUI equaled the Synaptic GUI.

If it "equals" Synaptic, it will be a dead loss. Presumably, it is intended to make Synaptic completely superfluous, which, IMO, it already is.

The point is to provide a non-garbage package manager for people who have to have a GUI.

I am addressing a GUI reference ability.

Since GUI oriented users may not be anointed as RDU's, I understand some might consider my point irrelevant.

It would be a good thing if the GUI obtains the rickh certificate of authenticity, so long as it can reference package information as well as Synaptic.

P.S. Just as Debian recommends Aptitude, Gnome, the default desktop of Debian, recommends Synaptic. It might be the better manager as far as GUI's go.

Actually Synaptic is recommended specifically by Debian not Gnome, or not only Gnome

synaptic is now the preferred Gtk GUI front end for APT

while

aptitude is now the preferred text front end for APT

Reasons:

synaptic is now the preferred Gtk GUI front end for APT. Its package filtering capability is easier to use than aptitude's. It also has experimental support for Debian Package Tags.

and

aptitude is now the preferred text front end for APT, the Advanced Package Tool. It remembers which packages you deliberately installed and which packages were pulled in through dependencies; the latter packages are automatically de-installed by aptitude when they are no longer needed by any deliberately installed packages. It has advanced package-filtering features but these can be difficult to configure.

All from http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/refer ... tml#s6.1.1

Also

synaptic is a graphical package manager. It enables you to install, upgrade and remove software packages in a user friendly way. Next to all features offered by aptitude, it also has a feature for editing the list of used repositories, and supports browsing all available documentation related to a package.

http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/ch-pkgtools.en.html

(my bold)

The aptitude gui looks very good to me. I'm not sure what value tags bring to APT either in synaptic or aptitude gui but I'll be interested to find out. Like lots of others I find synaptic extremely good for browsing, the gui does an excellent job of presenting multiple sets of information simultaneously and clearly, in a way that is possible in an ncurses UI but not achieved in aptitude's. I like synaptic a lot, haven't found any deficiency with it but I'm just as likely to use the terminal so at the moment I prefer apt-get/apt-cache to aptitude because apt-get/apt-cache behaves in a similar way to synaptic. Synaptic has evolved with apt-get and handles removing redundant packages as well as anything else now. I believe this functionality is a direct result of aptitude's developer sharing his improvements in true free software style so that they are implemented in competing/alternative tools.

I've read a fair amount about aptitude's superior resolving power but I haven't had any difficulties using apt-get or synaptic that would let me explore this. But if aptitude acquires a gui as good as synaptics I'll make the change. For me aptitude's ncurses UI is not it. Having used opensuse before Debian or Debian based distros I've seen how a really good ncurses UI can be done, with yast. The yast GUI is awful. It's slow, confusing, and worst of all it fails, hangs and crashes. But the ncurses UI for yast is a model of good design
with quick, easy navigation, information presented very well and high reliability/stability. An apparently simple UI lets the user configure everything on the system from kernel options, sysctl, device latency, modules, ldap, samba, firewall, packages, etc etc. It's kind of astonishingly brilliant. Not that the same tool is appropriate for Debian but it does show what's possible with a very good UI.

http://images.google.com/images?um=1&hl ... rch+Images

But anyway I've made positive mention of synaptic and a tool from suse in the same post so it's time to retreat to the bunker before rickh awakes from his slumber and drops a bomb on me.

As much as I hate spam, seeing this topic resource spiked my curiosity.

I went ahead and complied it and tried it. has a lot of potentiality and might switch to it later.

Mod edit to avoid confusion: The spam referred to in this post has been removed from the thread.

Jackiebrown wrote: I went ahead and complied it and tried it. has a lot of potentiality and might switch to it later.

I have been wanting to try it but havent got around to it. If someone had some debs or at least a binary to share it would be nice....hint...hint....

Does anyone regularly use the ncurses interface to aptitude? When I first started using aptitude, I thought I'd use it almost exclusively, but never did. I guess I just never took the time to learn it when 'aptitude update/upgrade' and 'aptitude install <package>' from the cli took care of 99.9% of what I needed.


sleepy

nah, I never use the TUI

I braved it once, but never did figure out how to use it. Not that it matters now, since aptitude doesn't live here anymore.