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

[NoOp]

On 09/28/2008 06:54 AM, Owen Townend wrote:
> 2008/9/28 Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca>:
>> 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
> 
> Great, it's now even less complex.
> $ aptitude search '~i!~M' -F '%p' > ${aptlist}
> I'm sure I got the inverse syntax expression from an earlier post
> around here but googling for '!(!~i|~M)' is no easy thing.
> 
> cheers,
> Owen.
> 
> P.S.
> The ~M matches _automatically_ installed packages.
> 

Tried it:

$ aptitude search '~i!~M' -F '%p' > ${aptlist}
bash: ${aptlist}: ambiguous redirect

$ aptitude search '~i!~M' -F '%p' > aptlist.txt
works.

for dpkg --get-selections > installed_apps.txt, you might want to try:

dpkg --get-selections "*" >myselections

"*" makes myselections include package entries for "purge" too.

and then use meld to show the differences between installed_apps.txt and
myselections. Note: you can also do a comaparison between aptlist.txt
and myselections just to see the difference, but they are not comparable
files so it will drive meld nuts for awhile trying to mark diffs.

ref:
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/quick-reference/ch-package.en.html#s-record
[3.4.9 Record/copy system configuration]