Okay fine "wrong" is perhaps too strong, it's rather "not appropriate/ideal". My point was simply that dpkg is lower level, so it should not be the go-to tool for normal users. The comment which started all this was the comment suggesting a command with "dpkg" was 'better' (because it was a few characters shorter I suppose), and I merely chimed in to point out that that was probably not a good thing to say, thinking of how this lower level tool provides more potential for mucking up your system; e.g., accidentally trying to remove an essential package; I believe dpkg wouldn't ask for confirmation right? Also new users would probably be overwhelmed by all the options of dpkg.

The only time I've been forced to use dpkg in the past ten years was when the system was seriously messed up e.g. in the middle of a failed upgrade.

> "this lower level tool provides more potential for mucking up your system; e.g., accidentally trying to remove an essential package; I believe dpkg wouldn't ask for confirmation right?"

Did you read anything I wrote? I specifically mentioned that dpkg would not remove an essential package...twice:

In my initial reply I demonstrated that dpkg would not remove an essential package:

  root@fw:~# dpkg -P coreutils 
  dpkg: error processing coreutils (--purge):
   This is an essential package - it should not be removed.
  Errors were encountered while processing:
   coreutils

And in my second reply I simply restated what my example had demonstrated:

"Furthermore some packages are so crucial (ie: essential) that dpkg does not even bother checking dependencies before erroring out."

> "The only time I've been forced to use dpkg in the past ten years was when the system was seriously messed up e.g. in the middle of a failed upgrade."

Just because the only time you had to use dpkg was when your system was messed up does not mean that dpkg is likely to mess up your system. Its like saying that the emergency room causes life threatening trauma because the only time I was seriously injured I had to go to the emergency room.

Does anyone know if there a name for this kind of fallacious reasoning? It seems like an amalgamation of "post hoc ergo propter hoc" and "cum hoc ergo propter hoc."

Yes, in this particular case dpkg will behave perfectly well.

The OP is, I believe, trying to argue that apt-get is in general less likely to blow your foot off, therefore you should default to using apt-get in general since it makes you less likely to lose a foot in the long run.

If you prefer to memorise specific safe cases for brevity of typing, that's absolutely fine. The OP, I think, prefers not to do so, and the same goes for me.

Assuming I'm correct in describing the OP's argument, hopefully you can now both go "oh, okay, that's what he meant" and move on :)

As a Debian user, you should be using aptitude instead of apt-get anyway :)

I know. Most of it is just a matter of aptitude not being around 12 years ago. I really like the search and install related packages functionality of aptitude.