Hi,

Walter Dnes <waltdnes@???> writes:

> Before doing anything, I'll backup /home (approx 30 gig tbz) and /etc
> to a usb drive. Also how do I get a list of packages that I've
> manually installedd via apt... without also getting the gazillion
> dependency libs they pull in? The least garbage/verbose I could find
> via Google was...

I would just use the `apt-mark showmanual` output as is. No surprises
that way. It will not include automatically installed dependencies.

BTW, I typically prune that list after a clean (minimal) install so it
only covers those packages I actually want. Guess yours is a bit too
long for your taste ;-)

> (apt-mark showmanual | while read -r pkg; do apt-cache rdepends
> --installed "$pkg" | sed -ne '1,/^Reverse Depends:$/d;{p;d}' | grep -q
> . || printf '%s\n' "$pkg"; done)

Hmm, the output of the above one-liner lists 46 fewer packages than what
`apt-mark showmanual` gives. Some of the missing ones I know for a fact
that I installed manually.

One example is zsh which I use for my login shell. It gets pruned from
the `apt-mark showmanual` output because runit _suggests_ it. Maybe you
should add --no-suggests (and more?, e.g. --no-enhances, --no-breaks) to
that `apt-cache redepends` invocation.

> First question; is Excalibur fully stable or are there any gotcha's?

It's fully stable for my needs. Yours may vary.

> Plan A) Is it possible to upgtade in place?

Yes. Machine I'm writing this (ThinkPad P14s) on was installed from a
Daedalus (5.0.1) CD-ROM image on a USB stick on 2025-01-05 and upgraded
to Excalibur on 2026-03-14.

Please do read and follow the upgrade notes at

https://www.devuan.org/os/documentation/install-guides/excalibur/upgrade-to-excalibur

for smoother sailing.

> Plan B) Nuke and repave, followed by restorung from USB drive.

Last resort or if you want to really clean up.
--
Olaf Meeuwissen