Re: Removing deb-multimedia pkgs w/o removing everything

[Dmitriy Matrosov <sgf.dma@gmail.com>]

On 09/15/12 21:38, Andrei POPESCU wrote:
> On Sb, 15 sep 12, 12:53:46, Ed Jabbour wrote:
> > I'd like to remove packages gotten from deb-multimedia and replace
> > some from the Debian repos.  However, removing them will also remove a
> > bunch  of libs and kde progs. E.g., apt-get remove libavcodec53
> > yields:
> >
> > 0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 190 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
> >
> > I'm not up to reinstalling 190 packages.  apt-get install that pkg
> > just tells me that "libavcodec53 is already the newest version".  Is
> > there any way around this?  Is it possible to easily replace the deb-
> > multimedia pkgs with the Debian ones?
>
> It's possible. I've done it with aptitude by looking up each package
> from the list generated by the command below and selecting the Debian
> version instead of the deb-multimedia version.
>
>      aptitude search ~S~i~Omultimedia
>
> With apt-get you would have to build up a big command line like
>
>      apt-get install package1/version1 package2/versions ...
>
> because there are lots of interdependencies which would get in the way.
You can find packages from deb-multimedia without aptitude as well. Like so

$ dpkg-query -Wf '${Package}\n' \
     | xargs -d'\n' sh -euf -c '
            apt-cache showpkg "$@" \
                | sed -ne"
                            s/^Package: //p;
                            /^Versions:/,/^Reverse Depends:/{
                                \_^[^[:space:]].*(/var/lib/dpkg/status)_p;
                            };" \
                | sed -ne"N; /_deb.multimedia_/P;"
            ' sh

Result of this command will be list of packages, which are installed 
(referenced
from /var/lig/dpkg/status) and that are available from deb-multimedia. 
If this package
version also available from other source (like squeeze repository), it 
_also_ will be
listed. Such extra packages may be filtered by editing 2nd sed's regexp.