Re: Backup package and dpkg (was Re: dpkg-disappear-replace.txt)

[Richard Kettlewell <richard@elmail.co.uk>]

Bill Mitchell writes:
>dhs@firefly.com (David H. Silber)
>
>> This is why I think that I would need dpkg to keep a log (in order) of
>> all installations and removals.
>
>An entry aging mechanism would also be needed, to keep the log from
>growing arbitrarily large.  Without that, entries are added but never
>deleted.  If entries are aged out by date, though, there'll be times
>when an aged-out entry would have made the difference between a good
>restore and one which is flawed because an aged-out log entry was
>needed.  The aging mechanism would need to be smart enough to
>remove entries which, in light of later package operations, no
>longer make a difference.

Is the information we already have sufficient?

-rw-r--r--   1 root     root          148 Aug  4 16:32 ytalk_nox.list
richard@muskogee:/var/lib/dpkg/info$ su -c 'dpkg --remove ytalk_nox'
Password:
(Reading database ... 15123 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing ytalk_nox ...
richard@muskogee:/var/lib/dpkg/info$ ls -l ytalk_nox.list
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root            0 Aug 17 15:23 ytalk_nox.list

...or is more need than that?

(Now lemme see ... I knew I had a ytalk.deb around here
somewhere... ;-)

ttfn/rjk