Ever since I learned about the benefits of aptitude vs apt-get I’ve switched over. It’s been great and I’m sure I’ve preached about the benefits before (/me does some digging and pulls up links) here.
Well, I ran into something yesterday that I haven’t been able to solve with aptitude. Is it possible to pull down the source code from the deb-src repository via aptitude and not apt-get source?
I’d sure appreciate if anyone can tell me a way.
I just use apt-get source. As far as I can tell, there is no way to download source packages with aptitude. Neither the man page nor the aptitude help page provide any indication that aptitude is capable of doing it. It’s truly a shame, as aptitude seems to do everything else that apt-get, apt-cache, etc. do.
I’m fairly certain that source package retrieval is not possible with aptitude. There’s really no way that aptitude could improve on the apt-get source method (it doesn’t alter the dpkg db or apt cache in any way), so implementing it would really just be duplication of work for little if any net gain.
Of course, the aptitude devs could be working on it even as we speak 🙂
It’s quite strange. If I go System > Administration > Software Sources, the Ubuntu Software tab does have the Source code checkbox. I guess it must mean something different from what I expected it to be. 🙂
Sources in System > Administration > Software Source doesn’t mean source code, it means from which server you are downloading packages.
Alex:
apt-get is deprecated in Debian. It is not recommended for use in scripts or, even, daily use, as it might be removed in some future release. Since apt-get is deprecated in favor of aptitude, an alternate way of retrieving source packages really needs to exist.
> apt-get is deprecated in Debian
No, it’s “aptitude” the deprecated one.
Aptitude is definitely not deprecated. It’s not installed on Ubuntu by default, but Ubuntu is not Debian and they make a lot of weird choices not made upstream. “aptitude upgrade” and “aptitude dist-upgrade” /commands/ are deprecated and have been replaced (within aptitude) by “aptitude safe-upgrade” and “aptitude full-upgrade”
Perhaps that lead to your confusion?