I have both apt-get and aptitude installed on my system. When I am performing any operation using aptitude, I see Reading extended state information
and Writing extended state information
. These messages are not present with apt-get. What state information is aptitude reading that apt-get is not?
I believe the extended state information is stored in
/var/lib/apt/extended_states
. Looking at the file on my machine, it stores the architecture for each installed package and whether or not those packages were installed manually or automatically (i.e. as a dependency of another package).Manual page of
apt-mark
(that is a command included in apt package) tells in FILES section:apt-mark
andapt-get
may modify the file. I don't know, ifaptitude
uses exactly the same file to keep account of automatically installed package. If there exits a record for a package in the file with linethen the package is automatically installed. Otherwise it is manually installed.