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.
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?