On Sun 05 Apr 2020 at 10:30:41 (-0500), Richard Owlett wrote: > I currently have a configuration of Stretch that meets most of my needs.
> 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. ] > > Is there a suitable tool? [Synaptic's History menu item is closest > I've found]. I assume that what you're after is a command like apt-get install a b c d … where the list is the shortest that would install the said system. In which case, I would presume the answer is no. But it's not too onerous to write a script to parse the status file (dpkg-query does the grunt work) and determine which packages are not a [pre-]depends/recommends/suggests of any other. You may or may not want to prune the resulting list, removing the names of any packages that the d-i has no option but to install itself. How kindly apt will take to be presented with such a list of packages for installation at one sitting, I don't know. Cheers, David.