Overall package list

[Christopher James Halse Rogers]

On Fri, 2008-10-31 at 15:13 -0600, Jeff Hansen wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am trying to find an equivalent to Gentoo's /var/lib/portage/world in 
> Ubuntu.  So far, it doesn't appear there is anything like it in anything 
> but Gentoo, which is unfortunate.
> 
> Basically I want to get a list of packages installed on the system, but 
> *only* packages that actually affect the installation of dependent 
> packages.  For example, Ubuntu has the ubuntu-minimal, ubuntu-standard, 
> and ubuntu-desktop "meta-packages" or virtual packages.  All you have to 
> do is install one of these packages (I'll use ubuntu-minimal for the 
> purposes of my question), and apt will automatically figure out all of 
> the dependent packages to install from there.

Hm.  Thanks for asking this question; it's made me dig into the aptitude
documentation a bit.  Turns out that aptitude's search mechanism is
substantially richer than I thought!

I suspect that the search you want is
"""
aptitude search "?and(?installed,?not(?automatic))"
"""
to select everything that's installed and not automatically installed
(ie: installed as a dependency of an explicitly installed package).
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