Mageia forum

First let me say that urpmi gets my vote as best package manager ever...
I was in the middle of an:

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urpmi --auto-select


When my broadband internet connection failed. (3 times) while it was trying to
upgrade Firefox. urpmi was smart enough to know some of the rpms were corrupted.
So all I had to do was rerun the command when my internet connection was restored.
And it picked up where it left off. Including successfully upgrading Firefox...

However I'm going to be migrating to a more recently salvaged HP Pavilion (the
existing machine was made for XP back in 2005. The one I'm about to move into was a
Win 7 machine until my brother in law crashed win 7 so bad that the tech people he
brought it to played taps for it. But before he junked it I got to boot a puppy Linux
keydrive on it, and there doesn't seem to be any hardware problems with it.

The thing is I've been using the network upgrade path for so long that I don't
remember what packages I chose to install. And I'd like to wind up with the same
tools that my bash scripts already know how to use...

Is there a way to get a list of all explicitly installed packages?

That is to say that I don't want to wind up explicitly installing those packages that
were automatically installed to meet dependencies. But I also don't want to wait till I
miss some functionality to find out which packages I chose to install on my old {current} PC.

Well, that's not that easy. You could get the list of all packages via rpm -qa --qf "%{NAME}-%{VERSION}\n" and then subtract the packages pulled in as dependencies, contained in /var/lib/rpm/installed-through-deps.list.
But it's not easy to get the list of packages you installed later on that were not contained in the base installation.

doktor5000 wrote:Well, that's not that easy. You could get the list of all packages via rpm -qa --qf "%{NAME}-%{VERSION}\n" and then subtract the packages pulled in as dependencies, contained in /var/lib/rpm/installed-through-deps.list.
But it's not easy to get the list of packages you installed later on that were not contained in the base installation.

Well at least that answers my question... I'll just have to wing it and hope I come close to it. I know that a LOT of it was added later <sigh> But your answer has at least saved me much aggravation trying to better understand the documentation.
So while it's not the result I hoped for, it IS a result that solves my lack of understanding. Hence I consider this one solved.

You could check the output of

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rpm -qa --last

which shows packages sorted by their installation date, which will show you which packages were installed during the initial installation and from there you could figure which you added later.

Also you could check if the output of

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journalctl -a --no-pager | grep -F "[RPM]"

(warning, may take a long time to process, as it will check all your journal entries since the first one, including all previous boots) helps, as it will also tell you which program initiated the installation (update via update applet, or installed via urpmi or rpmdrake)

Both contained in our software management MAQeia