It's not the direct answer to your question, because I'm not quite sure you can do all this with aptitude. BUT, there's one thing you have to take in account while doing "dpkg --get-selections" part: AFAIK Ubuntu package naming derived quite much from Debian’s, and thus LMDE's (espesically python packages as i recall), so you _might_ experience some problems when you'll "dpkg --set-selections"...
btw, > 3 Is there a reason to prefer the [`dpkg`, `apt-get`, `aptitude`] > workflow above to a purely-`aptitude` workflow for this usecase? > Yes, there is reason: it is well tested path... Regards ------------ Roman > > >
