Jigging with Debian
Wednesday, 26 December 2012
I found a package manager for Debian that I’ve never heard of: Wajig.
If you’ve tried to remember all the different commands to get different information about different aspects of Debian package management and then used other commands to install and remove packages then you’ll know that it can become a little too much.
Swapping between dselect, deity, deity-gtk, aptitude, apt-get, dpkg, gnome-apt, apt-cache, and so on is interesting but cumbersome. Plus personally I find dselect, deity, and aptitude confusing and even though I’ve spent hours understanding each of them, I don’t think the time was particularly well spent.
This Python script simply collects together what I have learnt over the years about various commands! Clearly I have yet to learn all there is.
As Andrew Tanenbaum once said: “The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from.” Even Debian documentation seems to advocate one tool, aptitude, or the older, apt-get, depending on where you look (at least at this time)…
aptitude – CLI and ncurses front end for Apt (recommended)
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
As for myself I seem to default to apt-get. In addition, the auto removal tools that are offered in any package management tools make me want to proceed with caution. Though, I have been told I worry too much. 🙂
