Ken Heard wrote: > In a new box where the Wheezy OS will be freshly installed I want to > install all the packages which I presently have in a box with Squeeze. This is a question that appears on the list every so often. People want to be able to do this. But unfortunately it isn't easy to do well in practice. It is easy do sloppily. But hard to do well. And so there are many proposed solutions but none of them work well. > # dpkg --get-selections '*' > selection.dpkg > # debconf-get-selections > selection.debconf > ... > You can transfer these 2 files to another computer, and install there > with the following. > # dselect update > # debconf-set-selections < myselection.debconf > # dpkg --set-selections < myselection.dpkg > # apt-get -u select-upgrade # or dselect install Typo there: s/select-upgrade/dselect-upgrade/ That is definitely the old venerable way of doing this on Debian from a decade of years ago. When working on the same version of Debian it even worked relatively well. Then. But now we have extended_states in APT supporting 'apt-get autoremove'. With regards to that the above no longer works well. For one problem it completely breaks the extended_states paradigm. The extended_states paradigm is to track for each package whether it was installed manually or installed as a dependency of another package. If you install foo and foo depends upon libfoo then foo is marked as manual and libfoo is marked as automatic. With the above get-selections, set-selections method then everything is set to manually installed. So if you do this then you must also take into consideration the extended states and handle it somehow. I suppose setting everything to auto, then running autoremove and saying no, then manually selecting top level packages to mark as manual, then repeating the autoremove, until the list is as desired would work okay. > Will this command sequence generally work when the "from" box has > Squeeze and the "to" box has Wheezy? Specifically, will the packages > installed in the Wheezy box having the same names as the ones in the > Squeeze box be the Wheezy versions rather than the Squeeze versions? Some will and some won't. Some packages names in Squeeze 6 have been dropped from Wheezy 7. Easier to answer this question yourself. Simply generate a list of all package names installed on your Squeeze 6 system and then test if they are available on a Wheezy 7 system. apt-get install dctrl-tools grep-status -s Package -n "install ok installed" > squeeze.list apt-get install apt-show-versions apt-show-versions $(cat squeeze.list) > wheezy.status Then examine the wheezy list and see what squeeze packages are in wheezy. > I would assume that when the second group of commands is run any > packages or config files already in the Wheezy box which are later > versions of than those in the Squeeze box would be left alone. The get-selections, set-selections process doesn't know about versions. APT will select for installation the newest available from the sources.list file. > Also it would appear that where there are no exact equivalents in the > two boxes the Squeeze versions would be installed if the dependency > situation allowed it; otherwise they would not be. > > To know what happened when the second group of commands is run can a > log file be thereby created for that purpose? When I am faced with this problem I set up a second machine and then install the packages that I want installed. Then I manually do the task transfer from one machine to the other. Edit /etc config files. Copy over raw data. Check out files that are checked into version control. That type of thing. Then I know for sure what has gone into the new system. And I know that lint and cruft on the old system isn't transfered. Or if it is transferred then it is all freshly done and available for documentation and future cleanup. Don't leave cruft to be tripped over later. Bob
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