On 28-03-2023 14:42, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
Hi LW,
If I wanted to duplicate the packages from one machine to another then I'd like the method to not alter the source machine, preserve my choices, and that some packages weren't explicitly wanted. In other words, duplicate. ... ...could you explain what you do want to achieve ? Well, I'm not the original OP but I have wondered about how to do this in the past.
‘pacman -Qqe’ lists the packages I've explicitly installed; call that set E.
If the dependencies of those refer to a virtual package and I satisfied it in the past on machine A by choosing package P then I don't think that adds P to the explicitly installed set. correct On machine B, I want to explicitly install package set E and have the choice of P made automatically. I don't want to make P explicitly installed on either machine A or B because it is just a dependency.
At every pick-a-package question on B, I could look on A to see how to re-make the same choice as before but that assumes A is available and is a tedious manual procedure.
Hope that's clearer. Perhaps I've a faulty assumption early on which makes my problem disappear.
Yup, much clearer. Pacman only has one mechanism to automate choices : --noconfirm . It is intended for scripts to answer pacman y/n questions and execute the default option. I am not 100% sure but do think it also does the same for N providers avaiiable for X questions and chooses the first (alphabetically) one in the providers list. Whether that is a good choice is another question . vulkan-driver is an example were the first choice is amdvlk and choosing this will often give problems with vulkan later. (just search the forum, plenty of people that choose that without considering if it was the correct choice) The correct answer to those N / X questions depends on factors unknown to pacman and is very hard to automate . A possible workaround could be to identify the virtual provides and choose a sensible provider for them. Those sensible choices would be entered in a set F that will be installed with --asdeps BEFORE set E. for vulkan-driver the sensible provider could be vulkan-swrast which uses the porcessor to implement vulkan support in software and should work on every system running archlinux. LW