Purging unlisted packages

[Henning Sprang]

Andreas Heinlein wrote:
> I have a question regarding "take-over" of clients not initially
> installed with FAI. Is it possible to purge any packages *not* listed in
> package_config during softupdate? 

No.

This would involve a quite complex algorithm, because you have track
down also all dependencies of explicitly listed packages, and their
dependencies an so on.

> I have read that one should not just
> remove a package from the list that was previously installed, but
> instead prepend it with a '-' sign. 

Depends on how clean you want the whole thing to be.
To be really clean, I'd recommend installing from scratch.


>But what if you do not know exactly
> which packages were previously installed and want to just remove any
> installed but unlisted package?

As said, it's theoretically possible but would involve quite a bit of
dependency tracking...

Henning


-- 
Henning Sprang
http://www.sprang.de