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Bug#225999: ITP: debsync -- installed packages synchronization tool



Arnaud Vandyck <avdyk@debian.org> wrote:

Hi,

Well, I was waiting for someone to ask that very question...

> What is the difference between your tool and do a
>
> $ dpkg --get-selections > list-of-master-packages.txt
> $ scp list-of-master-packages.txt user@host:/root/slave-packages.txt
> $ ssh host -l root
> # dpkg --set-selections < slave-packages.txt
> # aptitude install

The answer is quite simple : it's all automated. Ok you could write a
script that does just that, it'll take a couple of minutes to
write. Sure.

The interest of debsync, IMHO, does not really reside in what it can
do *now* but rather in what it will be able to do in the future (like
processing the remote hosts in parallel rather than one after the
other).

>From what the author told me, there should be a couple of improvements
in the next version, even if it'll probably still be an equivalent to
your 5 commands above. (btw, I'd like to see you use your 5 commands
to update, say, a hundred remote hosts. I'd offer the coffee)

In my experience, the use of dpkg --{get,set}-selections is something
that is not widely known, and still a very manual thing. What I see in
debsync is a tool that will come with the distro, ready to use, and
that won't require a "deep" knowledge of the interactions between apt,
dpkg and dselect.

What's important here is *having* the _tool_. The fact that it does
what you could do in 5 commands is irrelevant. And if you were to
write the script yourself, you'd have to test/debug it, etc.

I hope you see my point now :)

JB.

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