In natty we got a new tool called “apt-clone”. Its a commandline application that can be used to clone the packages state of a system and restore it on another system. It will save the full state (sources.list, packages/versions installed, auto-installed inforrmation) and optionally using dpkg-repack in order to save not/no-longer downloadable package (like debs that got installed manually via e.g. gdebi or dpkg -i). The file is pretty small because it just stores references to the files in the archive. One nice feature of the restore is that it can be applied to a different root directory (creating a chroot). I use this to reproduce upgrade issues and its really handy for this. Whats missing currently is modified conffiles detection, but there is some work on this in trunk.
apt-clone
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May 7, 2011 at 8:00 am |
Nice! Looking forward to using this tool!
May 7, 2011 at 8:15 am |
Not to be confused with “apt-clone” (apt-get using ZFS snapshots):
http://nexenta.org/attachments/download/80/Nexenta_debconf.pdf
May 7, 2011 at 12:02 pm |
Thanks! I was not aware of this one. It sounds like its doing what our “apt-btrfs-snapshot” tool is doing.
May 7, 2011 at 2:25 pm |
Can we get apt-clone and apt-btrfs-snapshot in Debian already?
May 9, 2011 at 1:24 pm |
Thanks for sharing, Michael. That’s great news. Do you think having an option to have the actual packages neatly put together in a single archive would be feasible ? Seems like the only missing piece for this to be a clean way to replicate an online system to offline LIveCD installs.
I have yet to find a tool that will do this in a simple, elegant manner.
May 10, 2011 at 3:30 pm |
Is there any good manual to use apt-clone?