Wandering Thoughts archives

Why apt-get is not my favorite application

In a nutshell:

# apt-get upgrade
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
3 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0  not upgraded.
Need to get 1351kB of archives. After unpacking 77.8kB will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

Truly, the count of packages to be fiddled with is more important that telling me what they are, by default. Here, apt-get manages to be simultaneously over-chatty and uninformative.

All too often apt-get doesn't seem like a program that is really at home with Unix and the Unix way of things. For all that it's a command line program, it doesn't feel much like part of a system; instead it seems to be its own little universe. As a result I wind up grinding my teeth most of the times that I have to deal with it.

Other irritations:

• why doesn't 'apt-get upgrade' default to doing an 'apt-get update' at the start? Local caches and databases are an implementation detail, not a user interface.
• why is it so hard to get just a list of the packages that 'apt-get upgrade' will upgrade? (A list of the package URIs is not the same thing.)
• the verbosity.

I have no idea why people love it so much. Personally I like yum a whole lot more (although it's gotten more verbose in Fedora Core 4).