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).
Comments on this page:
|
|