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/
