Should I switch to apt-get after upgrading to Squeeze?

Deerslayer · 04-29-2011, 11:57 AM

I'm running Lenny, and I've always used aptitude. The upgrade instructions on Debian's website say that apt-get is preferred for doing the upgrade to Squeeze, and also says that apt-get now provides equivalent functionality. So is there any reason to continue to use aptitude after upgrading to Squeeze, and if so, will there be any problems caused by having used apt-get for the upgrade? Or will there be problems caused by switching to apt-get after using aptitude before the upgrade?

jthill · 04-29-2011, 12:28 PM

I switched to apt-get. Aptitude will do more things for you and its defaults are often more helpful, but I've seen it get some rare corner cases wrong. From what I gather, that's been the case for a long time.

In my case it turned out to be a good thing anyway: I spent more time learning how to use dpkg as well, which I had severely under-appreciated.

TobiSGD · 04-29-2011, 12:30 PM

Nowadays there is no difference in using aptitude or the group of the apt-commands (apt-get, apt-cache, apt-file).
Use what you are more used to or learn how to use the side, no side effects, just your decision.

alan_ri · 04-29-2011, 01:51 PM

It is always advisable to read what is written on http://www.debian.org/ as the need arises.

That said, if you go here;Upgrades from Debian 5.0 (lenny) to Debian 6.0 (squeeze) you can read this (among the other things);

Quote:

In some cases, the use of apt-get for installing packages instead of aptitude might make aptitude consider a package as “unused” and schedule it for removal. In general, you should make sure the system is fully up-to-date and “clean” before proceeding with the upgrade.

Because of this you should review if there are any pending actions in the package manager aptitude. If a package is scheduled for removal or update in the package manager, it might negatively impact the upgrade procedure. Note that correcting this is only possible if your sources.list still points to lenny and not to stable or squeeze; see Section A.2, “Checking your sources list”.

To perform this review, launch aptitude in “visual mode” and press g (“Go”). If it shows any actions, you should review them and either fix them or implement the suggested actions. If no actions are suggested you will be presented with a message saying “No packages are scheduled to be installed, removed, or upgraded”.

It is desirable to remove any holds before upgrading. If any package that is essential for the upgrade is on hold, the upgrade will fail.

Note that aptitude uses a different method for registering packages that are on hold than apt-get and dselect. You can identify packages on hold for aptitude with;

Code:

# aptitude search "~ahold"

If that is understandable then it should be clear that upgrade should be done with apt-get and after the upgrade it is advisable that apt-get is used for package management.

To note;

Quote:

Note that it is bad practice to use aptitude and apt-get interchangeable, as they record changes made by a user separately.

And to finish, as you mentioned;

Quote:

The recommended way to upgrade from previous Debian GNU/Linux releases is to use the package management tool apt-get. In previous releases, aptitude was recommended for this purpose, but recent versions of apt-get provide equivalent functionality and also have shown to more consistently give the desired upgrade results.

jens · 04-29-2011, 02:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Deerslayer

I'm running Lenny, and I've always used aptitude. The upgrade instructions on Debian's website say that apt-get is preferred for doing the upgrade to Squeeze, and also says that apt-get now provides equivalent functionality. So is there any reason to continue to use aptitude after upgrading to Squeeze, and if so, will there be any problems caused by having used apt-get for the upgrade? Or will there be problems caused by switching to apt-get after using aptitude before the upgrade?

apt-get was the easy way to update from stable to stable.
Whatever you use next is your choice (I prefer aptitude and its many options).

craigevil · 04-29-2011, 04:01 PM

I have always used apt-get since back when Woody was Debian Stable.

Deerslayer · 04-30-2011, 10:57 PM

Thanks for the replies. I've decided to switch to apt-get. Unfortunately, the upgrade did not go well. apt-get won't get updates (lock issue), xserver won't start (looks like a driver issue, but it worked fine with Lenny...) and the customer relations management software (Vtiger), which is the raison d'etre for this server, won't run (MySQL issue). So I'm doing a clean install of Squeeze, which so far has gone quite well. I think that this is what I should have done in the first place; it will be a lot more work, but I think that the end result, with all new software, will be worth the effort.

widget · 05-01-2011, 01:37 AM

I have always found a clean install to be easier in the long run. You save a lot of time not having to clean out all the obsolete files, system and non system, that have built up in the drive.