On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 10:58:10AM -0500, Hendrik Boom wrote:

[cut]

>
> So uninstalling and purging aptitude's configuration looks viable. As long as it
> doesn't do nasties like uninstalling grub and wicd, which it was threatening to do
> a while ago.
>
> But I might first create myself an up-to-date bootable USB installation stick just
> in case.
>

There are thousands of Debian/Devuan installations out there which
have never used aptitude. I know that, for some misterious reason that
defies my logic, apt-get "is no longer the recommended primary tool"
for package management in Debian, and a similar death-sentence has
been issued for dselect in the same page:

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianPackageManagement

But again, I personally don't see the reason why this should be the
case at all, if we exclude the classic "oh, they are very old cli-only
tools, and anything that is old should become obsolete, sooner or
later, so better sooner than later because we need to reimplement them
in a more complicated and disfunctional way..."


The few times I have tried aptitude in the last ten years or so, I
have always ended up with zillions of useless packages installed just
because they were "recommended" or "suggested". It is exactly this
"I-am-a-stupid-but-still-idiotproof-software" a(p|t)titude that I find
very disturbing.

> Yes, I got myself into an ugly mess.
>

Not at all. There is nothing that you can't get sorted by using apt-*
and/or dpkg, and a bit of time and patience. Unless you have gone all
the way down to find yourself typing something like "Yes, my dear
apt-get-I-know-everything, I understand very well that by removing
this damn package I will most probably destroy my system, but you know
what? I want you to proceed anyway, immediately, and I also would
appreciate if you could just shut the fuck up and mind your business
in the future!" :D

My2Cents

KatolaZ

-- 
[ ~.,_  Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ - GLUGCT -- Freaknet Medialab  ]  
[     "+.  katolaz [at] freaknet.org --- katolaz [at] yahoo.it  ]
[       @)   http://kalos.mine.nu ---  Devuan GNU + Linux User  ]
[     @@)  http://maths.qmul.ac.uk/~vnicosia --  GPG: 0B5F062F  ] 
[ (@@@)  Twitter: @KatolaZ - skype: katolaz -- github: KatolaZ  ]