In my practise run the other day I noted that I had to use my dselect skills to deselect all except required packages. Then I exited dselect and ran dpkg --set-selections before running dselect again.
I also noted that the --set-selections acted only on those packages specified in the file. It left all other packages strictly alone. Seems to me that the above problems would be solved if we had a script (sed/awk) which would run through /var/lib/dpkg/status (using the output of --set-selections as input) as follows:- pseudo code for each package if it is "required", leave it alone else if it is referenced in the input file select or deselect it accordingly else deselect it done If the installation script were to run this prior to running dselect the novice would just pass over the "select" entry and proceed to "install". Can anyone come up with a suitable script? The two types of entries I saw in my first run were like this:- adduser install flex deinstall but it is quite possible that more types might show up as we progress down this track. Lindsay =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Lindsay Allen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Perth, Western Australia voice +61 8 9316 2486 modem +61 8 9364-9832 32S, 116E =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .