Re: Bug#317430: ITP: apt-history -- logs the changes when installing

[Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>]

Adam Heath <doogie@debian.org> writes:

> On Sat, 9 Jul 2005, David Pashley wrote:
>
>> On Jul 09, 2005 at 12:12, Nico Golde praised the llamas by saying:
>> > Hallo Matthew,
>> > >
>> > > Coreutils is required. Why is the ability to do something without it an
>> > > advantage?
>> >
>> > You can do almost every thing with with tools like, grep,
>> > sed, awk etc. but in my opinion this should be so easy as
>> > possible to everyone. Not everybody is familiar with grep
>> > etc. but apt-history show should be no problem.
>> >
>> > Regards Nico
>>
>> function apt-history () {
>>    grep " $1 " /var/log/dpkg.log
>> }
>
> Actually, apt-history would be prefered.
>
> dpkg logs everything that is actually installed.  However, apt installs
> dependencies based on install requests.  Those dependencies aren't actually
> important when recreating an install list.

The author mentioned it would use one of the apt hooks and then parse
the status file. That wouldn't get the apt commandline (i.e. what you
asked to install), but just the overall changes to the system (what
dpkg documents too).

I guess you would have to divert apt-get and aptitude for that and log
the invocations.

Actualy with aptitude taking the list of non automatic packages should
give you exactly the install list.

MfG
        Goswin