Re: Recovering /var (package status only)
on Wed, Jan 22, 2003 at 01:03:00AM -0500, Travis Crump (pretzalz@techhouse.org) wrote:
> Karsten M. Self wrote:
> >
> >>Here is a good article about recovering a Debian system without having a
> >>backup of /var/lib/dpkg...
> >>
> >>http://www.linuxworld.com/2003/0113.petreley.html
> >
> >
> >Funny, I walked someone through that on irc.debian.org:#debian last
> >week. This can be somewhat simplified from Nick's procedure. Rather
> >than manually re-selecting packages in dselect, you would take advantage
> >of the fact that Debian policy requires all packages to create an entry
> >in /usr/share/doc, with the name of the package.
> >
> > # Generate list of installed packages to Re-register previously
> > # installed packages as installed, using /usr/share/doc as a
> > # fallback package registry.
> > dpkg --get-selections $(
> > ls /usr/share/doc | grep -v [A-Z] | awk '{print $1 " install"}'
> > )
>
> Don't you mean 'dpkg --set-selections ...'?
Doh! Yes.
> Question about false positives(/usr/share/doc/ directories that don't
> correspond to a package): Are they a bug or is there nothing wrong with
> them? On my system I have the following false positives:
Note my filter: Any filename uppercased *isn't* a Debian package. This
should capture most of your instances.
It's possible to test the '/usr/share/doc is a decent package status
backup' hypothesis with:
$ dpkg -l $( ls /usr/share/doc | grep -v [A-Z] )
> The only one that would cause 'problems' would be 'kde' which would
> cause a lot of new stuff to be installed, but no real harm would be
> done especially since I couldn't find any false negatives. The first
> four and kde and kdebase and texmf appear intentional, but the others
> seem to be cruft left over from when packages changed names.
Hmm... I also found a few packages in purge state, might indicate
unclean removeals.
> Should they have been removed by package scripts at some point or were
> they left there on purpose?
I don't know, good question.
Peace.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Geek for hire: http://kmself.home.netcom.com/resume.html
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