On Wed, Oct 01, 2008 at 08:58:53AM +0100,
Malcolm Wallace
Indeed, the advice given by each of these tools IIRC was to update every time you used it, before doing anything else. (So why was it a manual task then?)
You can put it in cron (Ubuntu does it by default).
On the other hand, every one of those tools eventually failed for me on the update step, leaving me with an inconsistent and non-working configuration.
??? If something is wrong in the update step, the installed packages are not modified. If the database of *available* packages is corrupted (something I never saw with apt/aptitude or Gentoo's portage), then you cannot install new packages but existing packages work fine (the *available* packages database is distinct from the *installed* packages database).