This is a topic that comes up from time to time on the forum, but I've yet to see a good answer - hence this thread.
First, before getting into it, I'm not interested in any solutions that involve a time machine (i.e., require to go back and it from the start) or any solutions that involve complicated 3rd-party tools.
That said, i think many of us have faced this problem. You've got a (Pi) system that's been running for a long time (many years) and you've installed lots of packages (and tweaked the settings of those packages). You've kind of lost track of everything that you've installed/tweaked. Now, for any of a variety of reasons (e.g., you need to install a new OS in order to run on newer hardware), you need to build a new system and install all the packages that you had on the old system. Obviously, you should have kept better records, but here we are. Also, you could use the stuff in /var/log/apt, to tell you what's been installed, but that only retains the last 12 files, so that's not conclusive).
So, I'm wondering if anybody has come up any kind of good solution to this.
FWIW, the solution I'm going with is this: I have (or can get) the original image for the OS. I managed to mount that in a chroot and run "dpkg --get-selections". Then I diff'd that output against the current output of that command. That looks like it will get you pretty close and with some hand editing, should produce a list of things to install.
But I'm wondering if anyone has come up with anything better...
First, before getting into it, I'm not interested in any solutions that involve a time machine (i.e., require to go back and it from the start) or any solutions that involve complicated 3rd-party tools.
That said, i think many of us have faced this problem. You've got a (Pi) system that's been running for a long time (many years) and you've installed lots of packages (and tweaked the settings of those packages). You've kind of lost track of everything that you've installed/tweaked. Now, for any of a variety of reasons (e.g., you need to install a new OS in order to run on newer hardware), you need to build a new system and install all the packages that you had on the old system. Obviously, you should have kept better records, but here we are. Also, you could use the stuff in /var/log/apt, to tell you what's been installed, but that only retains the last 12 files, so that's not conclusive).
So, I'm wondering if anybody has come up any kind of good solution to this.
FWIW, the solution I'm going with is this: I have (or can get) the original image for the OS. I managed to mount that in a chroot and run "dpkg --get-selections". Then I diff'd that output against the current output of that command. That looks like it will get you pretty close and with some hand editing, should produce a list of things to install.
But I'm wondering if anyone has come up with anything better...
Statistics: Posted by BigRedMailbox — Fri Apr 19, 2024 5:56 pm — Replies 0 — Views 29