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.