Re: Return a Debian system to a pristine state
Dan Ritter wrote:
> Victor Sudakov wrote:
> > A production system, especially a desktop system, tends to accumulate
> > unnecessary packages. Users install software for testing, then forget
> > about it, or it falls into disuse...
> >
> > In FreeBSD, you can always run "pkg delete -a" and return to the
> > post-install state (well, almost). This command will remove all the
> > third-party packages added to the base system after installation
> > (modified files under /usr/local/ will remain).
> >
> > What's the procedure for Debian?
>
> There is no pristine state for Debian.
There should be, even if this "pristine state" is but a list of packages
at the moment of the first boot.
> Choices made during
> installation affect what the first boot experience looks like.
The first boot experience is what can be called a pristine state. If
something or someone saved that initial list of packages, it could be
called "the pristine state."
For the future, I'll always save the output of "dpkg -l" after the first
boot for later comparison, but I did not expect it was not being done
somewhere automatically already.
[dd]
>
> /var/lib/apt/lists/* has package information; if you grep for
> Priority: required you will find packages that *must* be
> installed. The ranking is:
>
> required > important > standard > optional > extra
This is interesting. This job of finding "extra" packages installed
since the first boot can probably be done by the user, but I expected
some ready solution to exist.
--
Victor Sudakov, VAS4-RIPE, VAS47-RIPN
2:5005/49@fidonet http://vas.tomsk.ru/
Reply to: