On 2020-05-28 at 07:40, Greg Wooledge wrote: > On Thu, May 28, 2020 at 12:15:41PM +0700, Victor Sudakov wrote: > >> Dan Ritter wrote: >> >>> There is no pristine state for Debian. >> >> There should be, even if this "pristine state" is but a list of >> packages at the moment of the first boot. > > But that set is NOT the same for everyone. The installer selects > some based on the hardware that it discovers during the > installation, and you select some in the task selection menu. Also, > there are several different installer images, including some that are > meant to be used as live, and some that have non-free firmware > packages.
As you yourself note, that can be addressed by defining the "pristine state" package set at install time - either when and as the packages that are to be installed are selected, or immediately after the installation has completed - instead of trying to pre-define it before the install begins. > If *you*, the one person on the planet who wants this, Clearly that's not true, or there wouldn't be a user base for the way FreeBSD does things which led him to have the expectation that this would be possible. > would like to achieve your goal, what you can do is get a snapshot of > *your* packages immediately after the installation, by running > > dpkg --get-selections > /root/initial-packages > > Just hold on to that file, and it will allow you to return to this > state on the same machine, or conceivably even a different machine. The suggestion of 'debfoster', from elsewhere in the thread, seems reasonable as well. Although that would then mean that debfoster itself would then be included in the list of base packages, which isn't necessarily desirable and isn't technically accurate. > If on the other hand your real goal is not to achieve package > reduction, but instead to *complain* about Debian, well, you've > already achieved it. > > If your real goal is not just to complain about Debian, but rather, > to make Debian *change* something arbitrary, just so that you feel > powerful, well, good luck with that. It seems to me that his goal (aside from finding a way to do the "revert to pristine state" in his own case) is to persuade people that Debian should implement, and in fact if possible should already have implemented, a mechanism to make such a pristine-state reversion possible in all cases - rather than having it be possible only if the user took a particular action, which is not clearly documented or suggested for that point, immediately after install. While I'm not particularly happy with the tone of his inquiries either, and I doubt that I would ever use such a mechanism if it existed, the basic idea doesn't seem like a particularly unreasonable one. I think your own pushback against it probably goes too far in its own right. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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