A tool for comparing a given installation to a standard installation is needed

[Traumflug]

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)]

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.

[Elias K Gardner (zorkerz)]

Oops nevermind I can't change the importance of things to mark it wishlist. This is not a bug not sure if I should mark it invalid?

[Traumflug (mah-jump-ing)]

A bug is not neccessarily a defect. To cite an engineer of Apple, Inc.: "There is something to do, so it's a bug".

Switching to "confirmed", as we are two now, plus a few positive comments on the devel-discuss mailing list:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2008-November/006122.html
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2008-November/006159.html

[Ameen Demidem (ameen.demidem)]

Looks like a very nice feature.
Still, it's not easy to tell how feasible it is and how effective/reliable it could be.
I wish Michael can give his opinion.

[Elias K Gardner (zorkerz)]

ubuntu software center has a log off all packages installed and removed. This in effect tells you how your system has changed from default. Also Synaptic marks packages as manually installed (although currently many packages from the initial installation are marked this way). Do the features add up to this bug being fixed?

[Traumflug (mah-jump-ing)]

The log isn't a good source for doing this comparison, as it will eventually become way to huge to be handled. Nice thing is, this log apparently knows about command line installations, so it's a general packaging system feature.

This marking as "manually installed" thing is a good one and once packages from the default installation are marked properly, it'll become usable.

If you want to close this bug, please do it. It's a feature request and the decision to forward the requested capabilities to other packages/applications is perfectly valid.

Anyways, thanks for taking care.