I've been trying to find alternatives to Cydia because in general it sucks. It has zillions of ads for every page load. It does an incredibly slow update every frickin time it loads. And it forces you to restart after almost every install - especially if you do anything with Springboard. You can't even (easily) schedule stuff to be installed and uninstalled on the same pass, but instead must sit through its glacially slow operation. On top of all that, Saurik is incredibly full of himself for doing something as simple as creating a package manager. It's crap and should be free as in speech.

Anyway, Icy is slow and buggy and Installer has its own set of issues.

I've recently started playing with aptitude and in doing so discovered that there's a whole host of applications that Cydia is hiding from you. aptitude doesn't appear when I search for it under cydia, but an "apt-get install aptitude" from the command line in Terminal works just fine. Saurik, are you trying to be anticompetitive in addition to putting out a crappy, over advertised product?

The only issue with aptitude is it's not really designed for such a small screen... plus the help.txt file is non-existent.

Anyone have experience with other package managers? Is there anything graphical out there that doesn't suck? Or at least, has less suck-age?

Is this the best forum for people that are getting into the guts of their iPhones or is there another that I should be reading?

Thanks!

twinotter

You're entitled to your opinion about Cydia, but please try to be reasonable and well-informed...

Aptitude is available in Cydia, in the Packaging section. If you don't see it, go to Manage, tap the Settings button, and set your user category to Hacker or Developer.

You can avoid many of the Cydia restarts by selecting a package, tapping Install, then tapping Cancel/Queue, then selecting Continue Queuing. After selecting the last package you want, you tap Install and the entire queue gets installed at once.

The ads are not of Cydia's making (in fact it is completely free and add-less). They are included by the Sources (repositories) to help pay for the considerable bandwith associated with hundreds of thousands of jailbreak-users downloading packages. I agree it's somewhat ugly and can at times be annoying, but it keeps everything free.

If you don't like Cydia, you may be delighted to hear that it's completely open source, so you can make your own version.

Now going to wait for your first positive contribution to the community....

__________________
iPhone 3GS / 3.1.2 JB (PwnageTool) / 04.26.08 carrier-locked, Carrier Logo Fixer / Cydia / 1000 posts on Hackint0sh

Installing Cydia programs on a phone that has no internet connection: read this.

Editing binary .plist, .strings, .nib and .xib files:
* on your computer: Windows tool / conversion website.
* on your iPhone: convert those files in a terminal with plutil (installed with Erica Utilities) or edit them with iFile (Cydia links).