On Mon, Aug 11, 2003 at 02:51:20PM -0500, Alex Malinovich wrote: > > On Fri, 2003-08-08 at 13:29, Michael Milligan wrote:
> > What would be really wonderful, though, would be to convince aptitude > > to save the selections I made into a file, which I could then feed > > into aptitude on the offline end (along with the downloaded packages) > > Does anyone know of a way to accomplish this? Bonus points if I can > > both download the packages, *and* save the selections, without doing > > the selection work twice. > After that, I'd suggest looking more closely at dpkg instead of > aptitude. This is how I wound up accomplishing this. Specifically, apt.conf can be massaged to cause aptitude to produce a log containing entries of the general form [ACTION] package version stuff and to place the downloaded packages in a handy user-writable directory without attempting to actually install them. These packages and the log were transported to the offline site, and sed used to convert the log into a file of "package deinstall" records for consumption by dpkg --set-selections after which dpkg --force-depends -r -a removed the unwanted packages, dpkg -R -i pkg_dir/ begins installing the replacements, and a few rounds of dpkg -c -a and dpkg -i <files> take care of installation ordering issues that would normally be APT's problem. I'd still be interested in finding a way of further automating some of this; e.g. getting aptitude to read back the actions in its log file, or to write out a pkgstates snapshot on demand. The existence of the -S option to aptitude suggests that this might be possible, but the documentation never mentions how. Thanks, ...Michael -- Key fingerprint = 9F6B E8F5 206F 35E9 FABB 9EAD 398D CD42 D1CE 8C87 See my homepage for PGP/GPG public key: http://home.uchicago.edu/~mbmillig/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
