A tool for comparing a given installation to a standard installation is needed
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adept Manager |
New
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
| synaptic |
New
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
| system-cleaner (Ubuntu) |
New
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
Binary package hint: system-cleaner
Those people not installing from scratch on each Ubuntu release often raise the question how their current set of installed packages differs from what they'd have if they'd have installed from scratch, on a clean disk. This tool should:
- Allow to set what the "standard" is (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, ...).
- Allow to find out which packages are currently installed, but wouldn't be installed on a fresh system.
- Allow to find out which packages are currently missing to be on par with a fresh installation of the "standard" Ubuntu.
Such a tool would ease maintenance of a given system a lot and should remove the neccessarity of reinstalling from scratch at all. For systems in use over years, reinstalling from scratch is obviously a lot of work, think about all the configuration adjustments done from time to time, think about users, groups and their data/home dir.
Currently, the only way to achieve this goal is to attempt to remove packages more or less randomly and to look wether the distribution meta-package would be removed as well. This is very tedious.
As the packaging mechanism it's self is pretty capable of keeping a system clean in the long term already, having a package-set-diff whould be a last, not too big and very welcome step to open these capabilities to be actually used by system admins and users.
| Elias K Gardner (zorkerz) wrote | #1 |
| Elias K Gardner (zorkerz) wrote | #2 |
| Traumflug (mah-jump-ing) wrote | #3 |
| Ameen Demidem (ameen.demidem) wrote | #4 |
| Elias K Gardner (zorkerz) wrote | #5 |
| Traumflug (mah-jump-ing) wrote | #6 |
Hi thanks for reporting this. As is a wishlist item I am going to mark it appropriately. I agree with you something like this would be a nice tool to have. I will add, however, in my experience the real dirt that gets into my system is from other customizations (i.e., config files) that would not be picked up by this tool.