On Sat, Apr 21, 2007 at 10:31:21AM +0200, "Peter Valdemar M?rch (vol)" wrote:
> Douglas Allan Tutty dtutty-at-porchlight.ca |volatile-lists| wrote:
> >I use aptitude (this is not a troll, please), and I use it interactivly.
> >I have only those pacakges that I specifically _want_ installed marked
> >as manual with everything else being automatic.
>
> Aaaaaa! What is *THIS*? "manual" contra "automatic"? This sounds
> interesting! I just use
>
> # apt-get install bla-bla-bla
See below but you can use aptitude install bla-bla-bla. It will mark
bla-bla-bla as Manually installed and anything that it has to install to
meet bla-bla-bla's dependancies as Automatically installed.
>
> Didn't know apt/dpkg kept track of and internally distinguished between
> manual and automatic installs. I was always curious about why it didn't
> distinguish between packages I explicitly ask to have installed and
> prerequisites for those pacakges and now I find that it does!!!
>
> I'll have to look into that! Can I query & change this from the command
> line?
>
Aptitude has fantastic search methods. For example, as part of my
backup strategy, I keep the output of
# aptitude search '~i!~M'
which means "give me the list of packages that are installed (~i) but
that are not (!) installed automatically (~M) (that is manually).
You can change the status by simply, for example,
# aptitude unmarkauto python2.3
# aptitude markauto python 2.4
> >So what happens if you run stable, run aptitude interactively to get
> >everything set up properly, then run update, then select the
> >upgradeable and security upgrades, then tell it to go ahead?
>
> Dunno. Haven't tried. Don't really like interactive programs for 100s of
> installations.
My suggestion is to use it interactivly on each box _once_. From that
point on use aptitude as a drop-in replacement for apt-get. Aptitude
will then keep track of things better than apt-get. This is why,
despite religious-type pontification, the release notes (for one) say
that aptitude is the preferred package management utility.
You may want to start by installing aptitude-doc-en (or just
aptitude-doc if you want all translations).
# aptitude install aptitude-doc-en
Then read the great manual.
Good luck,
Doug.
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