Dpkg feature request

[bruce@pixar.com (Bruce Perens)]

Tres Hofmeister wrote:
: 	Can someone point me towards info. on how one can duplicate the
: packages installed on one Debian system on another?  Going through
: dselect by hand seems just a bit too tedious for multiple
: installations...  Thanks.

From: heiko@lotte.sax.de (Heiko Schlittermann)
> Just install the base system from the first 3 floppies and
> copy the /var/lib/dpkg/status file from the `master' system, mount
> the distribution somewhere on the `slave', cd to the distribution
> toplevel and run `dpkg -iGROEB'.  Never tried this, so
> someone else?

I think this is _almost_ right. What you need is to copy the dpkg status
file in a way that marks the packages as selected _but_not_installed_ on
the second system. It would take a script to do this, because you don't want
to take anything that got installed in the base and mark it as "selected but
not installed". However, having the
capability to make lists of selections and pass them around would be nice.
Thus, I'll ask Ian Jackson. How about three flags to dpkg?

	--select package-name [package-name ...]
		Selects a list of packages for later installation.
	--deselect package-name [package-name ...]
		De-selects a list of packages for later removal.
	--list-selected
		Lists selected packages in a way suitable for inclusion in a list
		passed to --select.

There may well be flags to do this now, but I've missed them.
This would allow you to set up the selections via a shell script or something,
and then start dselect to fine-tune what you have selected.

	Thanks

	Bruce