Re: List of purged packages?

["Adam Warner" <lists@consulting.net.nz>]

Hi Colin Watson,

> OK, you're right that it's not the default state, sorry. That's not the
> whole story though:
> 
>   $ grep-status -nsPackage -FStatus 'purge ok not-installed' | wc -l
>     10312
> 
> The first word in the Status: line is the "want" status (as the dpkg
> sources call it), and describes the desired state of the package: so
> "purge" there doesn't mean it's currently purged, but that you've
> selected it to be purged.

Agreed. This must have all happened after I tried to import my package
selections from another computer. The apt-get dselect-upgrade tried to
install extra packages as well that I had never requested (probably due to
recommends). So I ended up doing it all using apt-get like I'm used to.

> A desired state of 'unknown' is how dselect tells the difference between
> new packages and packages it's seen before. Thus a single run through
> dselect's [S]elect screen causes everything on the system to be marked
> either as want_install or want_purge.

Ah. That explains it. This is not good as there should be a way to
distinguish between packages that have been purged and packages that have
never been installed.
 
> I use dselect on all the systems I run, so I tend to forget that the
> want_unknown state exists.

Understood. BTW the computer does have a faulty hard disk that I'm just
about to remove. However it is not the boot hard disk where the package
database resides.

Thanks for the explanation.

Regards,
Adam