Re: aptitude purge

[freeman <freeman@worldwidehtml.com>]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 11:33:19PM +0200, Tammo Schuelke wrote:
> 
>    I didn't purge though, which means that I have this now:
> 
>    dom0:~# aptitude search ~c
> 
>    c   amanda-client
> 
>    c   amanda-common
> 
>    c   amanda-server
> 
> 
> 
>    Is there a way to remove these entries from the apt database without
>    actually purging the packages, which would probably remove the newer
>    version including its configuration?
> 
>    I cannot put the packages on hold since they are not installed and I
>    sometimes like to use aptitude purge ~c after uninstalling a lot of
>    packages...

I handle this with an on-board repository. 

This gives me the ability to do everything with aptitude, change versions or
automatically update to outside repositories when something becomes
available.

I just drop the deb into my repository. When necessary, I make debs from
tar-balls with checkinstall, which I borrowed from lenny without conflicts on
etch.

Here is my repository:

root@Europa:/home/freeman# cd /etc/apt/debs
root@Europa:/etc/apt/debs# ls -al
total 13128
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root     4096 2008-08-24 21:52 .
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root     4096 2008-08-19 15:59 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 12174650 2008-07-05 13:46 amaya_wx-10.0.1-1_i386.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  1161354 2008-08-19 14:18 clamav_0.93.3-1_i386.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root      127 2008-08-20 12:44 notes
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root     1238 2008-08-24 21:52 Packages
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root     1248 2008-08-24 21:52 Packages~
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root      693 2008-08-24 21:52 Packages.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    13675 2008-07-05 13:50 repo-readme
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    25414 2008-08-19 15:45 repository-readme.html
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root       53 2008-08-20 12:10 textindex.sh
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root       44 2008-08-20 12:17 zipindex.sh
root@Europa:/etc/apt/debs#

Here is my sources.list entry:

# disk
deb file:///etc/apt/debs/ /

Here is textindex.sh which I run to get the text index, Packages, after
dropping new deb into the repo: 

#!/bin/bash
dpkg-scanpackages . /dev/null > Packages
exit

I edit Packages to remove problems in package listings. eg., checkinstall
could not get depends info from clamav tar-ball. This crashed aptitude. So I
deleted the empty "Depends:" line from the clamav entry in Packages.
Neither aptitude nor clamav crash now.

Here is zipindex.sh, which I run to get the actual gzipped repository
index, Packages.gz, form Packages:

#!/bin/bash
gzip -9c Packages > Packages.gz
exit

Here is my reference form making my repository:

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/repository-howto/repository-howto.en.html

-- 
Freeman