Re: Goal: a specialized inventory of installed packages
On Sun 05 Apr 2020 at 10:30:41 (-0500), Richard Owlett wrote:
> I currently have a configuration of Stretch that meets most of my needs.
> I'm setting out to do an _extremely_ custom *minimal* install of Buster.
> The desired inventory shall list *ONLY* top level packages.
> [ E.G. if gfortran was purposely installed, the ~dozen packages
> installed because they were tagged as depends, recommends, or suggests
> wold *NOT* be listed. ]
>
> Is there a suitable tool? [Synaptic's History menu item is closest
> I've found].
I assume that what you're after is a command like
apt-get install a b c d …
where the list is the shortest that would install the said system.
In which case, I would presume the answer is no.
But it's not too onerous to write a script to parse the status file
(dpkg-query does the grunt work) and determine which packages are
not a [pre-]depends/recommends/suggests of any other. You may or
may not want to prune the resulting list, removing the names of any
packages that the d-i has no option but to install itself.
How kindly apt will take to be presented with such a list of packages
for installation at one sitting, I don't know.
Cheers,
David.
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