apt-get system reinstallation

[sktsee]

On Wed, 2008-07-09 at 14:17 -0700, NoOp wrote: 
> On 07/09/2008 12:44 PM, NoOp wrote:
> 
> > 
> > I took the list of packages that 'aptitude reinstall ~i' spit out, put
> > them into Writer in OOo, removed all of the double spaces &
> > end-paragraph markers, put sudo apt-get install --reinstall on the front
> > and pasted the whole thing into a terminal. It currently says that I
> > have 1190 for reinstalland need to get 648MB of archives, I hit yes, and
> > off it goes...
> > 
> > 
> 
> Well that was interesting... all 1190 packages (6548MB) fetched and
> reinstalled just fine with the exception of the:
> 
> E: Couldn't configure pre-depend coreutils for debianutils, probably a
> dependency cycle.
> 
> Maybe it has to be swapped so that debianutils comes first in the
> command string.
> 
> So it doesn't look like that method breaks anything (so far). I don't
> think that will help with Bart's Fx3/Flash issues but it's an
> interesting "apt-get system reinstallation" excercise. Sundar's method
> only installs missing packages from the list (using dselect) so that
> doesn't reinstall them if you already have them on the system. dpkg
> --get-selections | grep -v deinstall > ubuntu-files does however create
> a complete list that could be modified similar to what I did with the
> aptitude reinstall ~i output though.
> 

I think it was an interesting exercise. Thanks for taking the time to
conduct it. 

-- 
sktsee