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  <title>Tumbleweed Rants</title>
  <subtitle>Stefano's World</subtitle>
  <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://tumbleweed.org.za/2006/11/30/migrating-to-aptitiude"/>
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  <updated>2008-09-19T09:23:27+00:00</updated>
  <entry>
    <title>migrating to aptitiude</title>
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://tumbleweed.org.za/2006/11/30/migrating-to-aptitiude" />
    <id>http://tumbleweed.org.za/2006/11/30/migrating-to-aptitiude</id>
    <published>2006-11-30T10:25:11+00:00</published>
    <updated>2008-09-19T09:23:27+00:00</updated>
    <author>
      <name>tumbleweed</name>
    </author>
    <category term="blogroll" />
    <category term="debian" />
    <category term="software" />
    <category term="ubuntu" />
    <summary type="html"><![CDATA[<p>After reading an article about <a href="http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/462">using aptitude properly</a>, I decided that it&#8217;s time to make the switch from <span class="geshifilter"><code class="geshifilter-text">apt-get</code></span>. Sure, on some <em>really</em> low memory systems, running <span class="geshifilter"><code class="geshifilter-text">aptitude</code></span> isn&#8217;t an option, but for most machines, keeping track of which packages were installed as dependancies really helps keep a&nbsp;system&nbsp;trimmed.</p>

<p>I didn&#8217;t like the way that the author did it, I opted for a variant of one of&nbsp;the&nbsp;comments:</p>

<div class="geshifilter"><div class="text geshifilter-text" style="font-family:monospace;">aptitude markauto &#8216;~i!~M!~nbuild-essential!~nsubversion!~nlibncurses5-dev!~npython&#8217; \<br />
&#8216;(~E|~prequired|~sdevel|~sinterpreters|~slibdevel|~slibs|~soldlibs|~sperl|~spython|~sshells)&#8217;</div></div>

<p>While rather a monster command, it does a good job of selecting things that were probably installed as dependancies. If you see anything in the list of things to be removed that you want to keep, you just add in an <span class="geshifilter"><code class="geshifilter-text">!~npackagename</code></span>. Then after that, I run <span class="geshifilter"><code class="geshifilter-text">aptitude</code></span>, limit to <span class="geshifilter"><code class="geshifilter-text">~i!~M</code></span> (installed, but not automatically) and mark everything that should be a dependancy with <span class="geshifilter"><code class="geshifilter-text">M</code></span>.</p>

<p>Then, it&#8217;s simply a case of only ever using <span class="geshifilter"><code class="geshifilter-text">aptitude</code></span>, and your system will be kept nice and&nbsp;clean&nbsp;:-)</p>

<p><a href="http://people.debian.org/~dburrows/aptitude-doc/en/ch02s03.html" title="From the aptitude manual">Aptitude search patterns</a> are really powerful, instead of having to do the whole <span class="geshifilter"><code class="geshifilter-text">dpkg -l | grep ^r</code></span> type mission, you can just do <span class="geshifilter"><code class="geshifilter-text">aptitude search '~c'</code></span>.</p>
    ]]></summary>
    <content type="html"><![CDATA[<p>After reading an article about <a href="http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/462">using aptitude properly</a>, I decided that it&#8217;s time to make the switch from <code>apt-get</code>. Sure, on some <em>really</em> low memory systems, running <code>aptitude</code> isn&#8217;t an option, but for most machines, keeping track of which packages were installed as dependancies really helps keep a system&nbsp;trimmed.</p>

<p>I didn&#8217;t like the way that the author did it, I opted for a variant of one of the&nbsp;comments:</p>

<div class="geshifilter"><div class="text geshifilter-text" style="font-family:monospace;">aptitude markauto &#8216;~i!~M!~nbuild-essential!~nsubversion!~nlibncurses5-dev!~npython&#8217; \<br />
&#8216;(~E|~prequired|~sdevel|~sinterpreters|~slibdevel|~slibs|~soldlibs|~sperl|~spython|~sshells)&#8217;</div></div>

<p>While rather a monster command, it does a good job of selecting things that were probably installed as dependancies. If you see anything in the list of things to be removed that you want to keep, you just add in an <code>!~npackagename</code>. Then after that, I run <code>aptitude</code>, limit to <code>~i!~M</code> (installed, but not automatically) and mark everything that should be a dependancy with <code>M</code>.</p>

<p>Then, it&#8217;s simply a case of only ever using <code>aptitude</code>, and your system will be kept nice and clean&nbsp;:-)</p>

<p><a href="http://people.debian.org/~dburrows/aptitude-doc/en/ch02s03.html" title="From the aptitude manual">Aptitude search patterns</a> are really powerful, instead of having to do the whole <code>dpkg -l | grep ^r</code> type mission, you can just do <code>aptitude search '~c'</code>.</p>
    ]]></content>
  </entry>
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