Backing up your package list WAS screen resolution problems with Hardy Herron

Derek Broughton news at pointerstop.ca
Sun Sep 28 12:42:14 UTC 2008


Owen Townend wrote:

> 2008/9/28 Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca>:
>> Owen Townend wrote:
>>
>>> Further to that... try something as simple as this to duplicate or
>>> backup your current set of apps:
>>> dpkg --get-selections > installed_apps.txt
>>> dpkg --set-selections < installed_apps.txt
>>
>> Well, actually, no.  That's a truly ugly way to install software, and I
>> heartily recommend NOBODY follow that advice.  You'll never get rid of
>> all the cruft in future (every single package on the system is now marked
>> as "manually installed" and will not be removed if nothing needs it in
>> future).
> 
> yeah, it was only an example of the possibilities with a single
> overarching package manager...
> I agree that NOBODY should actually use that particular method and it
> was not intended as advice, only as a possibility.
> 
> Something more like this would probably be closer to useable:
> $ aptitude search '!(!~i|~M)' -F %p > ${aptlist}
> (Search for the inverse of anything not installed or installed
> automatically)
> 
> What other ways do people use for this type of task?

In fact, that's pretty much exactly what I do - except that I went
through 'tr' and 'cut' to parse out just the package name.  Doh! Thanks for
that.

otoh, my search string is simpler: '~i !~M' - installed and Not manual
-- 
derek





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