Bug#508566: fai softupdates: list manually installed packages per default, provide option to remove them

[Holger Levsen]

package: fai-client
severity: wishlist
x-debbugs-cc: linux-fai at rrz.uni-koeln.de

Hi,

On Friday 12 December 2008 14:22, Henning Sprang wrote:
> 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.

Ain't it quite easy: fai generates a list of packages which should be 
installed. There is a list of packages installed on the system already, 
dpkg -l. Diff.

I think that would be a quite nice feature to have, also for the quite common 
case where the user is root on the machine and installs packages manually 
over time. (So the default should be to just list those packages, and then 
there could be an optional switch to softupdate, to also remove them.)

I think I will turn this into a wishlist bug, since the theoretical 
(superiour) approach, that one should never do manual changes and always plan 
everything, sadly doesn't always match with reality.


regards,
	Holger
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