On Mon, Sep 09, 2002 at 11:38:34AM +1200, Adam Warner wrote:
> Hi Colin Watson,
> > You can set the COLUMNS variable to something large (e.g. 200) to avoid
> > this. Alternatively, you can use grep-status from the grep-dctrl
> > package, with something like this:
> >
> > grep-status -nsPackage -FStatus 'purge ok not-installed' | sort
>
> Wow! What a treasure of a program. Debian's very own package grep.
grep-dctrl is one of the packages I install straight away on a new
system.
> > The above isn't really what you want then. Purged is the default state,
> > and if you ask for everything in the pn state then you'll get almost all
> > packages. Could you describe in a little more detail what your problem
> > is, so we can come up with something more useful?
>
> Purged is not the default state! Unknown (u) and not installed (n) is
> (un). For example only 5 purged packages exist on my main computer:
>
> grep-status -nsPackage -FStatus 'purge ok not-installed' | wc
> 5 5 78
>
> Purged is the state after a package has been installed and then removed by
> --purge (which removes the package and all configuration files).
OK, you're right that it's not the default state, sorry. That's not the
whole story though:
$ grep-status -nsPackage -FStatus 'purge ok not-installed' | wc -l
10312
The first word in the Status: line is the "want" status (as the dpkg
sources call it), and describes the desired state of the package: so
"purge" there doesn't mean it's currently purged, but that you've
selected it to be purged. The second word shows whether the installation
encountered any problems. The third shows the current state of the
package: "not-installed" is the initial state, and also what you get
after purging it.
A desired state of 'unknown' is how dselect tells the difference between
new packages and packages it's seen before. Thus a single run through
dselect's [S]elect screen causes everything on the system to be marked
either as want_install or want_purge.
I use dselect on all the systems I run, so I tend to forget that the
want_unknown state exists.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
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