Installed Software Query

[Brian McKee]

On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 8:04 AM, Mario Vukelic
<mario.vukelic at dantian.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 2008-11-15 at 12:26 +0100, Florian Diesch wrote:
>>
>> and this installs the packages from the list:
>>
>>   dpkg --get-selections < installed_software.txt && sudo apt-get
>> dselect-upgrade
>
> This, however, poses the problem that from then on, APT will regard all
> packages as "manually installed", as opposed to some being installed as
> a dependency by some other package. This will adversely affect the
> automatic housekeeping, as packages that are not really needed (because
> nothing depends on them, say, after you removed some packages by hand)
> are not going to be automatically removed.
>
> Unfortunately I don't know a solution to this problem. If anyone knows,
> please post, thanks.
>
Just went through this over on the debian user list.

old machine
 dpkg --get-selections > selections.txt
 aptitude -F '%p' search '~M' > auto-list.txt
new machine
 minimal install from cd - cli-expert option
 altered sources.list to match old machine
 mekg --set-selections < selections.txt
 dselect to install
 aptitude unmarkauto '~i'
 aptitude markauto $(cat auto-list.txt)

Worked great !

Brian