[Aptitude-devel] About the status and plans for aptitude

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

2011/11/29 David Kalnischkies <kalnischkies+debian at gmail.com>:
> On Sun, Nov 27, 2011 at 19:11, Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo
> <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com> wrote:
>> So, some of the questions (feel free to expand) that I am interested in hearing
>> opinions about:
>>
>>  - Does anybody know what's the current status and future plans for Aptitude?
>>
>>  - Does Cupt, Apt2 or some of the ongoing efforts based on PackageKit provide a
>>   complete replacement for what Aptitude is used today?
>
> First, define for what aptitude is used nowadays, then we can answer that -
> maybe. Personally, while i have never used aptitude, i wouldn't say that
> either of these is a direct competitor to aptitude.
> PackageKit is bound to dbus, something you seldom find on e.g. servers while
> as far as i know cupt and "apt2" don't have a curses interface planed or
> even implemented, but as a die hard APT user who never touched the others
> that's only guesswork.

Well, actually I thought that people in deity@ list, some of them
creating new software dealing with the same area of packaging, had
much better information than me about the topic, so I tried to come
with a humble attitude :)


>>  - Does Debian as a whole think that it's worth pursuing?  Maybe everybody is
>>   using just apt, synaptic or something else doing the task much better, and I
>>   didn't realise :)
>
> "Debian as a whole" properly thinks nothing. You will find every shade of
> "total crap" up to "tool from heaven" and that is fine.

According to [1], aptitude is installed in 98.91% of the machines
reporting to popcon, with at least 25.37% "voting" (actively using)
the package.  In comparison, synaptic is [2] is installed in 43.28%
(vote 15.32%).

[1] http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=aptitude
[2] http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=synaptic

And it's a piece of work created specifically for Debian and of little
to no use outside Debian and derivatives.  So I would have though that
there are from time to time meetings, BoF in debconfs or something,
treating topics like this.

At least I would expect that some people within Debian itself are
worried about the apparent stagnation of aptitude as of late, and had
considered doing something about it (even if it was just considering
it a deprecated tool).  And I thought that aptitude-devel@ and deity@
would be the best places to ask...

Thanks regarding the rest of the information, I just don't comment
about that because I dont' have much to say about it -- at the moment,
anyway.

Regards.