Raspberry Pi OS • Re: How to know what all to install on a system re-build?

It appears that 'apt' uses 'dpkg' so it ise 'dpkg' which we should mostly be using, and the '.info' file which indicates what's pre-installed appearing to be 'dpkg' generated would seem to confirm that.

On my PI 4B, comparing 'apt list --installed' against 'dpkg --get-selections" shows there is nothing from 'apt' which isn't identified by 'dpkg'.

Using 'dpkg --get-selections' shows 2,195 packages
Ignoring everything not marked 'install' leaves 2,179
Removing pre-installed included in the '.info' file leaves 671
After removing identified dependencies leaves 107
Of which the ones I agree I'd need to install is 38 (35%)

Which appears to be in line with the 35 determined using 'apt' previously.

But there's a lot more identified as needing to be installed which are dependencies that haven't been determined as such

I can determine a good number of dependencies from 'apt depends' but there are a fair number, about 70 (65%), which I can't.

I am not sure how to deal with that as 'dpkg' not handling dependencies was the reason for 'apt' and others existing.

This may be why it's deemed "not possible", has never been done.

Statistics: Posted by hippy — Sat Apr 27, 2024 5:25 pm

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