apt and dpkg question

[sktsee]

On Thu, 08 Jan 2015 14:22:11 +0100, Petter Adsen wrote:

> Hi all!
> 
> For various reasons, I need to do a reinstall on one of my machines,
> but I want to do as little work as is possible with regard to
> installing and removing packages. I've been looking at the man pages
> for aptitude-create-state-bundle, aptitude-run-state-bundle and dpkg
> (--{get/set}-selections), which both seems to do what I want.
> 
> What is the difference here, and which approach should I go with? It
> seems that the aptitude approach saves my software sources, signatures
> and so on, which would be perfect as I'm using a few ppa's, but I'd
> like to get some advice before I go ahead and mess up :)
> 
> Everything that I need backups of is already backed up, so I'm not
> worrying about that - I'm just concerned with replicating the current
> state of installed/removed packages. Also, If there's anything else I
> should be aware of, I'd appreciate any advice.
> 
> Thanks,
> 

You might have a look at apt-clone, which does the same thing as the 
aptitude bundle, but with the added benefit of not using aptitude :). 
Also if you install dpkg-repack, apt-clone can use it to recreate 
packages that you installed manually if, for some reason, you no longer  
had access to them and weren't available for download anymore. 

-- 
sktsee