Jan Engelhardt writes:

Have you tried `rpm -qa --qf="%{NAME}\n"` and then feeding that list back into zypper?

That just gives me all installed packages, which is 8370 of them. I was hoping for some incantation that at least weeds out packages that were installed as dependencies of others or as part of a pattern from this list. Regards, Achim. -- +<[Q+ Matrix-12 WAVE#46+305 Neuron microQkb Andromeda XTk Blofeld]>+ SD adaptations for Waldorf Q V3.00R3 and Q+ V3.54R2: http://Synth.Stromeko.net/Downloads.html#WaldorfSDada

Jan Engelhardt writes:

On Wednesday 2023-04-19 22:36, Achim Gratz wrote: comm -23 <(rpm -qa --qf="%{NAME}\n" | sort) <(sort /var/lib/zypp/AutoInstalled)

OK, so that information can actually be requested from zypper, just not quite as elegantly as one would hope since there is no machine readable output available: zypper -ts 10 se -i | grep i+ | tr -d ' ' | cut -d: -f2 | sort -u Similarly the list of explicitly installed patterns: zypper -ts 10 pt | grep i+ | tr -d ' ' | cut -d: -f2 | sort -u This will let you know which packages got installed as part of base: zypper -ts 10 info --type pattern base | grep '^ i' | tr -d ' ' | cut -d: -f2 | sort -u Regards, Achim. -- +<[Q+ Matrix-12 WAVE#46+305 Neuron microQkb Andromeda XTk Blofeld]>+

On 4/22/23 02:08, Carlos E. R. wrote:

There is a way to have the rpm command generate a list of modified configuration files. There was in YaST, long ago, a module that did a backup of the system, and it used that trick to find out what to backup. I made a script that must be somewhere, I can dig it out.

Having /etc (and a bit more) backed up is easy, and that's pretty much what's needed for configs. And data and /home directories, that's also easy. My largest issue has always been to know which packages to install when I needed to restore a machine. That's where I typically have lost most time and made most mistakes.

But then you also need a way to clone the btrfs setup, and that ain't trivial.

I use custom disk/filesystem setups anyhow and have good docs of how I did those, that's also not a big issue. Also, restoring a machine from backups doesn't necessarily need to be bit-by-bit perfect (if you want that, there's different tools for that), it just needs to ensure that everything works again as it should, in as little time as possible. KaiRo

Johannes Meixner writes:

Could you explain your particular reason behind why backup and restore of all the files is not feasible in your case?

I've accumulated quite a bit of cruft on that machine over the last 9 years that I want to shed during the transition.

I ask because installing the same patterns and packages does not re-create an existing installation because plain installing RPM packages results a pristine "raw" system with the default configuration files from the RPM packages that must be configured as needed.

That was indeed the intention. Anyway, it appears that over time quite a few packages have been marked as explicitly/user installed that probably were installed as dependencies originally, so I'll have to spend a bit of time comparing the list of packages on the old and new machine plus a third one that I use for experimentation to figure out what's a good set of packages to start with. Regards, Achim. -- +<[Q+ Matrix-12 WAVE#46+305 Neuron microQkb Andromeda XTk Blofeld]>+ Factory and User Sound Singles for Waldorf Blofeld: http://Synth.Stromeko.net/Downloads.html#WaldorfSounds