Re: Question about get-selections

[J.M.Roth <lists+debianuser@roth.lu>]

Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. <bss <at> iguanasuicide.net> writes:

> >I'd rather do
> >aptitude -F '%p' search '~i~M' > auto_installed_packages
> >Your command does not work if the package state is e.g. 'i A'
> >(note the space)
> 
> Actually, it only works in that case.  Of course, because of the search 
> terms, all the packages will have status 'i A'.

That's what I meant.

Now... I've been playing a little bit with this.

First, I get some 
warning: Unknown type error, skipping line 
using debconf-set-selections < ...

While that does not worry me much, I get a
xargs: aptitude: exited with status 255; aborting
at the end of
xargs -r -- aptitude markauto < ...
Probably, this is because conflicts are generated, however there were/are no
conflicts on the original system.

Of and BTW you had better use:
#dpkg --get-selections | awk '$2 == "install"' > ...
(Note the *two* equality signs) I was wondering where all those unnecessary
conflicts were coming from ;-)

I need to say that sometimes I feel a bit dazzled by all these tools
dselect
dpkg
apt-get
aptitude
....
After a dpkg --set-selections I have to use 'apt-get dselect-upgrade' instead of
'apt-get upgrade'. However, the standard 'aptitude install' works fine and seems
to know about the --set-selections. I am not clear what kind of information is
available to what kind of tool. I guess the auto flag of aptitude is exclusive
to aptitude, otherwise we would not have to set it manually. I guess one has got
to have the overview over all that first.... ~.~

Oh and I guess to make things really right one would have to use 
--get-selections '*'
during the backup, or an additional
dpkg --clear-selections
before the restore. Just a thought.