On 20091103_114547, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote: > On Tuesday 03 November 2009 10:38:41 Johannes Wiedersich wrote: > > Andrew Sackville-West wrote: > > > On Sun, Nov 01, 2009 at 07:08:00PM -0500, Andrew Reid wrote: > > >> For the sysems I back up at work, we do the dpkg --get-selections > > >> thing, but I've never kept a copy of the boot sector -- that's an > > >> excellent idea. > > > > I guess the 'state of the art' way of recording a list of installed > > packages, nowadays is > > > > # aptitude -F "%p" search '~i!~M' > package-list > > > > You can then just install like > > > > # aptitude install $(cat pacage-list) > > > > dpkg --get-selections does not distinguish between packages installed > > manually or automatically, so that information is lost on the reinstall. > > The search pattern just looks for packages that were installed > > manually. The install will automatically install all dependencies. > > However, because of OR dependencies (i.e. using the '|' character), it might > install *different* packages to satisfy dependencies. Your saved > configuration files won't work with those packages. > > Some combination of dpkg --get-selections and aptitude search '~M' should be > able to save both "all installed packages" and "all automatically installed > packages", and some combination of dpkg --set-selections, aptitude markauto, > and aptitude install should be able to restore them.
My suggestion is: # aptitude -F "%p %M" search '~i' |tr -s ' '|sed 's/ A$/+M/' > package-list followed by (without change except for fixing the missing "k" ;-) # aptitude install $(cat package-list) I haven't actually tested this. It is just what I think would work from reading the aptitude documentation. By later today I may be able to do some tests without trashing one of my systems. The theory is that aptitude install understands that appending '+M' to a package name is an indication that it is to mark the package as having been installed to satisfy a dependency. The rest of the magic incantation follows. Question: Where would be a good place for the file, package-list, within the Debian way? In /etc/apt/ ? Or /var/backups/ ? Elsewhere? -- Paul E Condon pecon...@mesanetworks.net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
