[Aptitude-devel] Bug#665822: Bug#665822: introduce user own marker on installed packages

Daniel Hartwig mandyke at gmail.com
Mon Mar 26 16:10:35 UTC 2012


On 26 March 2012 20:38,  <r.3 at libertysurf.fr> wrote:
> Package: aptitude
> Version:0.6.3-3.2
>
> Hello,
>
> I think aptitude lacks a feature : being able to tell the user what he has
> installed already (in order to let him do clean up). I think of a feature such
> as in windows (control panel / add or remove programs), were you can
> identify easily what you have installed.
>

You can get very similar to Windows add-remove-programs with just '~i!~M'.

Better, in fact, because the list will not contain programs which are
simply dependencies of others (i.e. the junk searchbars and such that
come with many Windows software).

> the automatic/installed/not installed categories do not tell if a package
> was there because it was a choice of the distribution, or if it is there
> because the user installed it.
>
> To do that, Ubuntu.fr provides a nice command on
> http://doc.ubuntu-fr.org/aptitude, though it could be updated :
> aptitude search '~i!~M(!~tubuntu-desktop!~tminimal!~tstandard!~tprint-server)(!~n^grub$!~n^linux-!~n^aspell$!~n^openoffice.org-l10n-common$((!~n-fr$!~n-fr-)|~ndoc-fr$))'
>

If you ignore everything but the first part it is more memorable:

$ aptitude search '~i!~M'

but will show you some "distribution packages" also.  However, I think
you will find that is still a much more manageable list and can also
be used interactively, by pressing L and entering the same search
pattern.

APT and aptitude already make a good effort to keep track of which
packages the user has specifically chosen to install.  It is difficult
to mark the distribution packages as otherwise, so these are mostly
counted as manually installed.

Regards





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