Comment 29 for bug 92862

> I have heard this "aptitude is prefered" before but have never seen any official documentation to support it.

From the dpkg man page:

"dpkg is a tool to install, build, remove and manage Debian packages. The primary and more user-friendly front-end for dpkg is aptitude(1)."

I agree with Evan that there should be some global configuration for this, but it seems to me that aptitude as a default is better than apt-get, and we're going to need a default either way.