On 2020-04-05 at 11:30, Richard Owlett wrote: > I moved from WindowsXP when Squeeze was the current release. In the > first year I did *many* installs from scratch to determine what I > wanted in a final system (made much use of preseeding). > > I currently have a configuration of Stretch that meets most of my > needs. As the installation was performed using the default Debian > installer, there is a plethora of packages of no interest installed. > As some important packages are not installed by default, apt and > Synaptic were used to install them. > > I'm setting out to do an _extremely_ custom *minimal* install of > Buster. The desired inventory shall list *ONLY* top level packages. [ > E.G. if gfortran was purposely installed, the ~dozen packages > installed because they were tagged as depends, recommends, or > suggests wold *NOT* be listed. ] This sounds like a job for apt's "manual" vs. "auto" status flag. 'apt-mark showmanual' will list all the packages which are flagged as being manually installed. Specifying a package explicitly to 'apt-get install' or similar flags it as manually installed, if you actually go through and complete the installation (cancelling the install also cancels the flag). Any packages which it pulls in as dependencies - whether "Depends:" "Recommends", or "Suggests:" - get flagged as "auto" instead. From what I've seen, it looks as if debian-installer also flags some packages as manually installed, during initial install of the Debian system. I don't know which ones do and don't get that treatment. I don't know if that's good enough for you, but it's very likely the best you're going to get. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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