Of course, the real way to return ANY system to a pristine state is to
do a re-install from scratch.
Which, one might add, is why we have things like Ansible.
Miles Fidelman
On 5/28/20 1:15 AM, Victor Sudakov wrote:
Dan Ritter wrote:
Victor Sudakov wrote:
A production system, especially a desktop system, tends to accumulate
unnecessary packages. Users install software for testing, then forget
about it, or it falls into disuse...
In FreeBSD, you can always run "pkg delete -a" and return to the
post-install state (well, almost). This command will remove all the
third-party packages added to the base system after installation
(modified files under /usr/local/ will remain).
What's the procedure for Debian?
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.
Choices made during
installation affect what the first boot experience looks like.
The first boot experience is what can be called a pristine state. If
something or someone saved that initial list of packages, it could be
called "the pristine state."
For the future, I'll always save the output of "dpkg -l" after the first
boot for later comparison, but I did not expect it was not being done
somewhere automatically already.
[dd]
/var/lib/apt/lists/* has package information; if you grep for
Priority: required you will find packages that *must* be
installed. The ranking is:
required > important > standard > optional > extra
This is interesting. This job of finding "extra" packages installed
since the first boot can probably be done by the user, but I expected
some ready solution to exist.
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why. ... unknown
