[Aptitude-devel] What I'm really missing in aptitude / synaptic

[Daniel Burrows]

On Fri, Aug 17, 2007 at 11:42:21AM +0200, MNO <manostienen at gmail.com> was heard to say:
> Dear readers,
> 
> i hope this is the right place to post this request.
> 
> What I'm really missing in aptitude / synaptic is:
> 
> - a file dump of all the installed packages + the /etc/apt/sources.list.

  You can do that with dpkg --get-selections and tar (to wrap up
/etc/apt and /var/lib/aptitude, maybe /var/lib/apt too).

> - a way to import the above files (from my personal website) so that i
> can install all those packages with a few simple commands.

  untar the files and run dpkg --set-selections.

> - an add on that can collect all my config files.

  tar will do that if you point it at /etc.  Of course, not everything
in /etc is suitable for being moved between computers, but there's no
information available telling tools which files to ignore.

  It sounds to me like what you're asking for is either trivial or
really hard, but I don't know which, and I don't know where aptitude is
supposed to come into it.  It might help if you provided some use cases:
say exactly what you want to do and exactly what should happen; I'm
just guessing what you meant above.  Just because it's obvious to you
doesn't mean it's obvious to me. :-)

  Daniel