Comments on: Migrating aptitudes knowledge about auto-installed packages

By: sven

sven — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 10:31:37 +0000

@martin:

That might work, but certainly only if you first install the packages and then copy the file over. If you have a package marked as auto-installed and later call aptitude install on it, it removes the auto-installation mark from then package.

By: martin

martin — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 09:54:39 +0000

Hmm, i just copied the aptitude statefile over from my old 32bit system to my new 64 system…. I don’t remember the details, but it worked like it should. I guess you could even get away only copying the file and then using aptitude to install all the packages too…

By: sven

sven — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 17:05:44 +0000

@stew

Ouch, you are right. I didn’t notice since I don’t have any packages on hold (I checked after your comment).

As for the other comments about aptitude already supporting all that’s needed, I will explain the commandline shown as the manpage for aptitude in Etch is a bit hard to read (see bug#415468). Also the available search tags are not documented in the manpage at all, but in the seperate reference manual.

-F %p

tells aptitude search to only list the package names.

~i shows only installed packages
!~M shows only packages which are not auto-installed.

By: stew

stew — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 14:44:45 +0000

your method of finding installed packages:

“COLUMNS=200 dpkg -l | grep -E ‘^ii’| awk ‘{print $2};’ `”

will miss packages that are installed, but on hold. (which would have ‘hi’ and not ‘ii’)

By: Gilles Mocellin

Gilles Mocellin — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 20:58:31 +0000

Hum, aptitude has all the required options to make this selection :
# aptitude -F “%p” search ~i\!~M

By: Andreas Janssen

Andreas Janssen — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 18:48:59 +0000

Try this:

aptitude search “~M” -F %p > list

will search all packages set to auto, and only show the
package names.

cat list | xargs aptitude markauto

should import the information.

By: Romain Francoise

Romain Francoise — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 16:35:58 +0000

aptitude search ‘~M’?