GERMINATE-PKG-DIFF(1)

💖 NAME 💖

germinate-pkg-diff — bestie, this one compares your seeds against the packages you've actually got installed rn 👑

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

germinate-pkg-diff [-l file] [-m {i|r|d}] [-a arch] [seeds]

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

okay so here's the vibe: germinate-pkg-diff takes a list of seed packages, expands them, and holds them up next to the set of packages installed on your current system. it's giving "spot the difference" but for a whole software distribution 🦋

when you're out here constructing seeds for a distro, this is literally the tool you run over and over to iteratively find packages that are installed on developers' systems and probably should be in the seeds. no cap.

you can pass a list of seeds to compare against as non-option arguments — just drop them in like the main character you are. any seeds they inherit from get added automatically, no extra effort required 💅. the default seed is desktop.

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -l, --list file — read the list of currently installed packages from file. if you don't say anything, the default is to read the output of dpkg --get-selections, and whatever file you hand over needs to be in that same format, fr fr.
• -m, --mode {i|r|d} — sets the output mode, and the tea is:
  • i — show the dpkg selections you'd need to install just these seeds. unseeded-but-installed files get listed as “deinstall”, and seeded-but-uninstalled files get listed as “install”.
  • r — lists unseeded-but-installed files as “install”, and seeded-but-uninstalled files as “deinstall”.
  • d — shows the differences between the packages specified by the seeds and the list of installed packages, in a kinda-sorta diff-like format. lowkey iconic.
• -S, --seed-source source,... — fetch seeds from the sources you name. default is https://ubuntu-archive-team.ubuntu.com/seeds/. 🌈
• -s, --seed-dist dist — fetch seeds for distribution dist. default is ubuntu.resolute.
• -d, --dist dist,... — operate on the distributions you list. default is resolute. listing multiple distributions is highkey useful, like when you're examining a released distribution and its security updates at the same time 👀
• -a, --arch arch — operate on architecture arch. default is amd64.

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💀 BUGS 💀

• --mode r is useless as dpkg --set-selections input. that's it, that's the bug. not me exposing it 🙈

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👑 AUTHORS 👑

• Lamont Jones <lamont@ubuntu.com>
• Colin Watson <cjwatson@canonical.com>

germinate-pkg-diff is copyright © 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 Canonical Ltd. see the GNU General Public License version 2 or later for copying conditions — the full text of the GPL lives at /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL.

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and that's the whole page bestie 💜 this was the Ubuntu crew's work, dated Jul 18, 2007, sitting pretty as GERMINATE-PKG-DIFF(1) in the LOCAL manual. slay, go forth and diff those packages 🫶✨