There has been a small discussion in the debian-users mailing list about how to restore a system that was, in the following order: 1. Installed, slink (for example) 2. Upgraded (apt-get update, dist-upgrade pointing to frozen) 3. A copy of the /var/cache/apt/archives was made in another partition 4. The system for some reason is wiped out (surge, stupid mistake, whatever) Now: The system can be brought back to stage 1. easily from the slink CD or so. It seems that in order to get to stage 2. another lengthy download is necessary, but most of the packages are already somewhere in the hard drive. The problem is that the dependencies, order, etc, is not anywhere in the /archives, so an average user will be unable to determine what to do. Somehow this makes dpkg unusable to some extent for the average user to achieve that purpose. Apt-get will probably not be able either, since there is no packages.gz Questions: 1:) What is the best way to make apt-get use the /archives folder to perform the upgrade and return the system to stage 2. above? 2:) Perhaps some other feature can be added to apt-get to allow this reconstruction to occur in a smooth way? That would save bunches of bandwidth, etc, etc...
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