"Douglas A. Tutty" <dtutty@vianet.ca> writes:
Here's what I do (I'm on dialup).
2. backup to plain text:
selections from /etc including fstab, inittab, networks.
output of sfdisk (hard drive partitions) which can be fed
back to sfdisk to fix a busted partition table
output of aptitude search '~i !~A' which means all installed
packages which are not automatically installed.
Just because a package is automatically installed doesn't mean that it
is the choice the package manager would choose. For example many
packages depend on www-browser, but which one is automatically
installed? You can use aptitude to select the one you want and then
remove any other automatically installed one, but how will it know
that if you install from that list later?
I'm not getting after you about this, because I still don't know the
best way to handle this. Most dependencies are a single item, so this
isn't a problem in those cases.