[maemo-developers] Aptitude for Maemo

[From: Jeremiah Foster]

On Jan 24, 2009, at 4:15 PM, Eugene Agafonov wrote:

>> Is it possible to only install "aptitude" package without "apt"  
>> package
>> on a Debian based distribution like Maemo ? apt-* utils are in the  
>> "apt"
>> package, but apparently, "Depends:" of "aptitude" package does not
>> require apt, but just somes libraries of APT system.
> I think so: aptitude uses libapt, not apt it self, but 'wasting' disk
> space on desktiop is minimal.
> It looks like apt-* is directly used by Hildon Application Manager.
>
> When I started porting aptitude on Maemo I supposed to use in mostly
> in Scrachebox/Maemo SDK, not on real device.
> I really hate apt-get/cache in Scratchbox (compare output of
> 'apt-cache search' and 'aptitude search' )

If you don't like the search output from those two tools, you may want  
to look at apt-file. From the man page: "apt-file is a command line  
tool for searching files in packages for the APT package management  
system." I find it to be the "canonical" source for finding packages  
on my system. Written in perl, it is a 600 line program, so it is  
fairly light-weight, though I suspect it's cache is rather heavy, (on  
my machine it comes in at 14 megs, but I am running it on a x86  
desktop.) Your mileage might vary if you have a smaller system.

Jeremiah