Offline aptitude?
Maintaining as I do a number of machines with poor connectivity to the internet, I make heavy use of the technique described in the "APT Offline Usage Guide" to upgrade packages on these systems.
However, I now find that I need something even more powerful: offline aptitude! The situation is, a couple of machines need to be somewhat repurposed, and the best way to get the exact package scheme I want (including a lot of selective upgrades and manual conflict resolution) that I have so far found is to use aptitude. If I can get it to work in a similar "offline" mode, that is.
So far, I have convinced the thing to use the same fake apt-tree that offline APT uses, which means that it works just fine for downloading the needed packages. I also got it to write out a log of actions taken, so technically I have all the information I need to perform the upgrades.
What would be really wonderful, though, would be to convince aptitude to save the selections I made into a file, which I could then feed into aptitude on the offline end (along with the downloaded packages) to perform the actions automatically. Otherwise I'm going to spend a lot of time manually removing deselected packages in between installations and upgrades.
Does anyone know of a way to accomplish this? Bonus points if I can both download the packages, *and* save the selections, without doing the selection work twice.
Many thanks,
...Michael
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