RE: Replicating a system... sort of

[Walter Tautz <wtautz@math.uwaterloo.ca>]

On Thu, 20 Feb 2003, nate wrote:

> Narins, Josh said:
> > I was under the impression that if you wanted to copy selections from one
> > machine to the next, the proper syntax was
> >
> >                       vv
> > dpkg --get-selections \* > file
> 
> not sure, but I've done the dpkg --get-selections >selections and
> imported on another machine(running the same distribution) several
> times with complete success. I probably wouldn't try it with different
> distributions since chances are perhaps some packages have been
> changed..but if your going from stable -> testing on a new machine I'd
> rather go stable->stable then upgrade the new machine to testing *after*
> all the packages have been installed from stable.
> 
> nate
> 

actually the \* is relevant since packages that are purged on a machine A

will not be purged on machine B if you insert the output into dpkg
--set-selections.... this is easily confirmed by looking at the output with and
without \* ....