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Re: easy selection of debian packages?!



On Wed, 2 Dec 1998, tuvia beker wrote:

> Yet another question, this time to the debian gurus amongst you lot.
> It is well-known that debian weakest point is the terrible interface of
> dselect. While there is an ongoing development effort of substitutes
I don't think that dselect has any interface problem. Moreover, it is much
more easier to handle your server with dselect, and if you don't want the
UI of dselect you can always  perform the current job with dpkg (dselect is
just a front end to dpkg)
> (deity, apt-*), these are not yet mature enough, in my opinion.
Haven't tried them yet, but I heard a lot of good things about them.
> However, something like RedHat's 'kickstart' installation option (or
> slackware's good old tag files) must surely be available. What I mean is
> that once you have made the selection of packages to install on one given
> system, it shouldn't be too difficult to pass the same selection to other
> systems you want to install.
Once I tried to explain this same thing to the Debian developers, I think
that some of the agreed and that they are working on that.
There isn't any easy way I know of.

There is a way I wanted to implement but didn't have the time. You can get
the information about installed and available packages from the files at
/var/lib/dpkg. All you have to do is:
1. When installing a machine -- Install it the old way till the reboot
(you could have some shortcuts here too, but this is more complicated).
2. NFS mount (you can do it now since you have a running Linux) /var of a
an installed Debian to /othervar. NFS mount the Debian archive  to
/debianmnt.
3. Use the tools you wrote to parse the files at /othervar to manually run
dpkg and install the packages from /debianmnt.
4. Now you have two identical Debian machines.

If you feel motivated enough (and have the time ;-)), you can write
your scripts so they can compare two status files, and update the client
computers every night.

Liran. 
---
http://www.math.tau.ac.il/~liranz/