Aptitude is awesome and it's in my fingers, but it's slightly different from apt-get... which may turn into a problem if you do stuff with something like puppet, which uses apt-get.
I think I also had to install aptitude on this box (ub 12.04) as it only came with apt-get installed - apt-get is more universal.
Edit: Hrm. 'aptitude' is not the tool of choice for dist-upgrading Debian. I was fresh-installing my debian laptop last year from testing to sid and it was failing to work properly. Hunting down the issue online, it turns out that for dist-upgrades, you just use apt-get. One of those domain-knowledge gotchas :/ Used apt-get, and it went flawlessly.
I think I also had to install aptitude on this box (ub 12.04) as it only came with apt-get installed - apt-get is more universal.
Edit: Hrm. 'aptitude' is not the tool of choice for dist-upgrading Debian. I was fresh-installing my debian laptop last year from testing to sid and it was failing to work properly. Hunting down the issue online, it turns out that for dist-upgrades, you just use apt-get. One of those domain-knowledge gotchas :/ Used apt-get, and it went flawlessly.