Enhancing the upgrade/install experience

[Seth Vidal]

On Tue, 24 Nov 2009, Bruno Wolff III wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 10:12:16 -0700,
>  Jim Bevier <jim at jbsys.com> wrote:
>> I need some help.....
>>
>> During testing of different rawhide releases (alpha, beta, rc's,
>> etc) I usually have an existing system and would like to install a
>> "duplicate" of my old system.  This is also true if I upgrade from
>> release to release.  I would like to get a list of existing packages
>> (rpm -qa | sort > package_list) and somehow feed this into yum (or?)
>> and have the packages installed if not already installed.  I would
>> also need a list of packages that could not be installed. This way I
>> could start with the live cd or install dvd, do a fresh install and
>> then update to a duplicate of my old system.  So, is this
>> functionality available?  Can it be?
>
> You can use rpm -qa to get a list of what is installed now and save it
> in a text file. There are options to get just the package name or you
> can edit the file an do it there pretty easily. You can use those package
> names on a yum install command later to get back the rough equivalent to
> what you had before. You shouldn't expect to have the exact same set of
> packages installed as new packages sometimes replace older packages or
> dependencies change.

look at yum-debug-dump and yum-debug-restore.

in yum-utils

-sv