Exclude apt dependencies

[Darren Hobbs]

Hi,

I'm looking into blueprint as a way of automating setup of our Ubuntu developer workstations. I'd like to get to a state where we can install a fresh copy of ubuntu, run a single script and have a 'standard' developer machine ready to go.

It looks to me like blueprint is 'flattening' all the apt packages when I do a create and not preserving which ones were explicitly installed and which were installed to satisfy dependencies. My first question is: am I right in that belief? If so, is there a way to preserve the dependencies? This is important because if we don't preserve the dependencies then apt can't do any automatic clean up if packages are removed and their dependencies are no longer required.

Many thanks,

-Darren

[Richard Crowley]

You're correct that the list of packages Blueprint deems important is
flattened as you describe. It keeps track of the dependent packages
so it can install the correct versions when applied later.

Blueprint isn't capable of removing packages, be they "top-level" or
dependencies, unfortunately, but if you `apt-get remove ...` or
`apt-get autoremove` and create a new blueprint you'll at least have a
record you can diff against.

I know that's not a complete solution to your problem but I hope it helps.

Richard